Is Happiness Dispositional or Situational?
I did it again. Not for the first time, I thought that I understood something and then I read a book that forces me to re-think my assumptions about what I thought I knew was true. In this case, I read Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. Zimbardo says that many disciplines take a dispositional view For example, a dispostional view of happiness is that happiness is "inside" an individual). It "belongs" to the individual. However, social psychologists tend to take a situational view oft hings. Yes, individuals are important but how they feel and behave depend on the group dynamics and other environmental factors. If that is the case, happiness would be an attribute "shared" by all group members when the social dynamics are just right. I will probably need a few months to do some more reading and think about it before I can formulate my opinion on this question.
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