The Situationist

While lurking around the internet last night looking for new stuff to read, I stumbled across what appears to be a really interesting blog run by some folks at Harvard's Law School entitled The Situationist.  Here is their "about" statement for the blog:

There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else. Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception. Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong. “The situation” refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are irrelevant in explaining human behavior. “Situationism” is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation. It is informed by social science—particularly social psychology, social cognition, and related fields—and the discoveries of market actors devoted to influencing consumer behavior—marketers, public relations experts, and the like. The Situationist is a forum for scholars and students to debate, promote, and examine the situation and its effects. The Situationist is associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.

Here is their "about" statement for the The Project on Law and Mind Science:

The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School is devoted to identifying, inventorying, archiving, blogging, and otherwise promoting research, writing, conferences, colloquia, and presentations directed toward understanding the implications of social psychology, social cognition, and other related mind sciences for law, policymaking, and legal theory.

Both the blog and the project itself seem really exciting.  Hopefully, I can cajole some of the people who contribute over there to contribute here (and vice versa).  For while I have had some success recruiting more philosophers and psychologists to play along, I have not had much luck with attracting legal scholars.  And since this blog is supposed to be "dedicated to interdisciplinary research in philosophy, psychology, and legal theory"--it would be nice to have more discussion here concerning the relationship between our research and the law.  Either way, I figured some of you might like to check out what they are putting together at HLS.