I didn’t pay too much attention to this post from Tyler Cowen but wow am I having trouble getting it out of my head:
This position can be seen as a variation on the theme of the “strong situation hypothesis” (Cooper and Withey, 2009). This hypothesis, based on the work of Mischel (1977), proposes that personality differences are especially like to be outwardly expressed in “weak” situations offering no clear situational clues and a wide range of possibilities as to how to behave. Conversely, individual differences are expected to have less room for expression in “strong” situations where the choice of behavioral outcomes is severely limited and where everyone is bound to behave in a similar way.…Thus, individual risks could play a magnified role in highly disadvantaged neighborhood contexts.
That is from Tama Leventhal, Véronique Dupéré, and Elizabeth A. Shuey, “Children in Neighborhoods,” In Handbook of Child Psychology and Development Science, edited by Marc H. Bornstein and Tama Leventhal. New York: Wiley, 2015, p.520, academically gated link here, an excellent and consistently interesting survey piece complementing the recent economic studies by Chetty and others.
Ungated Cooper and Withey is here (pdf), also worth your time. Here is a related Wikipedia entry, perhaps not as clear as it might be.
Circumstances drive actions. Most people behave the same when driving down the highway. I like to think that presidents of the United States are all mostly interchangeable with defeated hopefuls.
Not Unreasonable 