There’s a fascinating blog project at the “The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.” The blog is called The Situationist, and it bills itself as “a forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to examine, discuss, and debate the effect of situational forces – that is, non-salient factors around and within us – on law, policy, politics, policy theory, and our social, political, and economic institutions.” What do they mean by situationism? It’s an approach to countering the “dominant conception” that man is a rational actor — a conception on which many of our “laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised.”

Huge mission, and they’ve got a gaggle of smart people on it. I am liking the blog, and I am thinking of making it required reading for my research on All Things That Rise. The ATTR mission is similar — to explore the “physical, intellectual, and emotional limits of human beings.” And The Situationist, like all good blogs, is a gateway to other relevant musings. Today, they posted a long excerpt from a great article by the Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett titled, “The Nature of Temptation.” Bennett asks why the standard bearers of morality so often fall prey to vice. It’s a refreshing take on an old subject. I won’t repost as much as the article as The Situationist did, but here’s the nub of the argument:

It’s almost as if a reputation for morality is a gateway into vice.

And in fact, according to a growing body of psychological research, that may be exactly what’s going on. The study of how we form opinions of our own moral worth is a budding field, and it suggests that the human mind works in powerful, subtle ways to make hypocrites out of all of us – especially those who hold themselves in the highest moral esteem. People who inveigh against a vice in others are often themselves fixated on it, and more likely to succumb to its allure. And, the research suggests, virtuous deeds are often a form of penance for thoughts a person is ashamed of.