Paul Krugman believes that liberals are situationists, while conservatives are dispositionists: Liberals talk about circumstances; conservatives talk about character. As a case in point, he suggests that the only way to stop the extremely wealthy from engaging in conspicuous consumption is to
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Shane Bauer writes about an Atlantic article on life in prisons that neglects to interview a single prisoner. Perhaps it is the way we dehumanize prisoners as a group that allows journalists to avoid seeing how unacceptable it is to neglect their side
The Coalition at Harvard Law School sent a series of letters to the Harvard Law School faculty and administration. Their first letter included the following introductory paragraphs: This campus and the nation erupted in outrage when grand juries
From an article by Tyler S. Olkowski, for The Crimson: Nearly half of the Harvard Law School student body signed an open letter to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in the wake of recent grand jury decisions
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (2014). Perspectives on Politics, Volume 12, Issue 03, September 2014 pp 564-581 Abstract: Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American
From Amnesty International (includes a link): . . . The recent spate of incidents of lethal force used against men of color by law enforcement from New York to Los Angeles has once again demonstrated the need to take a
An interesting article linking individualism to wheat production and situationism to rice production. For example, Americans are more likely to ignore the context, and Asians to attend to it. Show an image of a large fish swimming among other fish
From Dig Boston: Rebecca Chapman, HLS ’15, who went to Ferguson in October, notes that, “despite what we are taught in law school, the law is not neutral; lawyers and law students have a unique perspective on the reality that
An article of interest in the latest issue of Psychological Science: Subjective Status Shapes Political Preferences, by Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, Kristjen B. Lundberg, Aaron C. Kay B. Keith Payne (November, 2014). Introduction Economic inequality is at historically high levels and
Paul Piff, a social psychologist, presented some of his collabarators’ recent research on the disturbing situational effects of wealth in a recent TEDx talk. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8Kq1wucsk] Michael Lewis’s recent piece in The New Republic summarizes some of that research and some