t is a truism in psychology that personality and situations interact to generate behavior; people are always acting within various behavioral contexts. People are both products of their different environments and producers of the environments they encounter. Human beings are not passive objects simply buffeted about by environmental contingencies. People usually select the settings they will enter or avoid, can change the setting by their presence and their actions, influence others in that social sphere, and transform environments in myriad ways. More often than not, we are active agents capable of influencing the course of events that our lives take and also of shaping our destinies. Moreover, human behavior and human societies are greatly affected by fundamental biological mechanisms as well as by cultural values and practices.

I am reminded of two illustrations from my youth about how situations transform people and the reverse, how people can transform situations.

Sonny M. was the swiftest guy on the block, and one of the most reserved and mild mannered in our gang. He could have been an all-star collegiate track or football player had he gone to college. Instead, he enlisted in the Marines. We were all proud of him until he returned from boot camp and began to describe how he had learned to kill an adversary with a chop to the nose that drove his septum into his brain. Before any of us could utter, "how horrible," Sonny looked around for the approval he expected, smilingly adding, "Neat, huh?" He was never again our Sonny; he had become their warrior-killer.

A second military example of a very different sort involved my kid brother, Don, who hated being in the army. He deplored its regimentation, mindless drills, and having shaved off all his handsome wavy, black hair. Somehow, he survived boot camp, in part by escaping duties in such endlessly creative ways that he became known in his outfit, as “The Shadow.” After the required social isolation period of boot camp, our family could visit him at the Fort Dix base in New Jersey. Along with hundreds of other eager families, we gathered in a huge impersonal mess hall for the big for Sunday dinner. I had expected that setting would be depressing, but in no time at all, each family's table was filled with homemade food, music, laughter and story telling. Mom had made all of Don's favorites, especially the lasagna; Dad had smuggled in his best red wine in grape juice bottles, and I brought a rum-rich Sicilian Cassata birthday cake. Over there, a Puerto Rican family was enjoying arroz con pollo; there an African-American family was sharing its ribs and greens. Some portable radios played sweet music. Don was again back home in the South Bronx because for a moment in time we had transformed that situation from grim to gracious, from military cold to ethnic hot.

Such examples illustrate the bi-directionality of person-situation transformations, but in my own research over the past 30 years I have tried to show that social situations often exert much greater power over human actions than has been generally acknowledged by most psychologists or recognized by the general public. This Situationist approach is a corrective or counterweight to the dominance of the traditional dispositional perspective that has been at the core of Anglo-American psychology. The primary focus on personality and inner determinants of behavior is fueled by the reliance on an individualist orientation, in contrast to a collectivist orientation that places greater emphasis on the community as the basic unit rather than the person. The Individual is the coin of the operating realm in virtually all of the major Western institutions of medicine, education, law, religion, and psychiatry.

These institutions collectively help create the myth that individuals are always in control of their behavior, act from free will, and are thus personally responsible for any and all of their actions. Unless insane, or of diminished capacity, individuals who do wrong should know that they are doing wrong and be punished accordingly. Situational factors are assumed to be little more than a set of minimally relevant extrinsic circumstances. In evaluating various contributors to any behavior of interest, the dispositionalists put the big chips on the Person and the chintzy chips on the Situation. That view seemingly honors the dignity of individuals who should have the inner strength and will power to resist all temptations and situational inducements. Those of us from the other side of the conceptual tracks believe that such a perspective denies the reality of our human vulnerability. Recognizing such common frailties in the face of the kind of situational forces we have reviewed in our journey thus far is the first step in shoring up resistance to such detrimental influences and in developing effective strategies that reinforce resilience of people and communities.

The importance of adopting the situational perspective also provides a knowledge base to shift attention away from simplistic "blaming the victim," as well as ineffective individualistic treatments designed to change the evildoer. Instead, this alternative orientation directs a search toward more profound attempts to discover causal networks that should be modified if evil behavior is to be prevented, circumvented or stopped. Sensitivity to situational determinants of behavior, also signals alerts for avoiding or changing situations likely to engender vulnerability to their power. As noted earlier, the situational approach is to the public health model of disease causality and prevention as the dispositional approach is to the traditional medical model.

However, for those of us reared in the individualistic mode of thinking, it is hard not to succumb to the fundamental attribution error of constantly overplaying the dispositional while underplaying the situational. Recall my earlier description of the emotional melt down of prisoner Doug-416 after only 36 hours of imprisonment in the SPE. Perplexed by this unexpected breakdown of someone who had been a ringleader of the rebellion, we decided that he must have brought in some latent pathology that our initial screening had not detected. Despite the fact that we were all focused on demonstrating the power of this situation, we had reverted to a dispositional attribution for this prisoner's surprising reaction. Even I had to be reminded: It was the Situation, stupid, which was doing in tough little Doug-416!

Several related issues come to the fore when we emphasize situational determinants of behavior. First, we should be aware that a range of apparently simple situational factors could impact our behavior more compellingly than seems possible. The social psychological research reviewed here (along with much more that I could not cover in this journey) points up the influential force of: roles, rules, group pressures to conform, emergent group norms, group identity, uniforms, anonymity, social modeling, authority presence, symbols of power, time pressures, semantic framing, stereotypical images and labels, among many others.

Second, the Situationist approach should encourage us all to share a profound sense of humility when we are trying to understand “unthinkable,” “unimaginable,” “senseless” acts of evil-- violence, vandalism, suicidal terrorism, torture, or rape. Instead of immediately embracing the high moral ground that distances us good folks from those bad ones, and gives short shrift to analyses of causal factors in that situation, the situational approach gives those “others” the benefit of “attributional charity." It preaches the lesson that that any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do -- given the same situational forces.

It becomes imperative to constrain the immediate moral outrage that seeks vengeance against wrong doers and rather instead, to uncover the causal factors that could have led them in that aberrant direction. Even if from the selfish motive of wanting to know what went wrong so we don't step again in the same mess, the altruistic Situationist will use that knowledge first to help others step over it.

Third, our system of criminal legal justice over relies on common-sense lay views held by the general pubic about what things cause people to commit crimes, usually motivational and personality determinants. It is time for the legal justice system to take into account the substantial body of evidence from the behavioral sciences about the power of the social context in influencing behavior, criminal actions as well as moral ones. My colleagues, Lee Ross and Donna Shestowsky have offered a penetrating analysis of the challenges that contemporary psychology poses to legal theory and practice. Their conclusion is that the legal system might adopt the model of medical science and practice by taking advantage of current research on what goes wrong, as well as right, in how the mind and body work.

”The workings of the criminal justice system should not continue to be guided by illusions about cross-situational consistency in behavior, by erroneous notions about the impact of dispositions versus situations in guiding behavior, or by failures to think through the logic of ‘person by situation’ interactions, or even comforting but largely fanciful notions of free will, any more than it should be guided by once common notions about witchcraft or demonic possession.”

©2006-2009, Philip G. Zimbardo