A critique of Ross and Nesbit’s “The power of Situations”

All people will be faced with many decisions in their lifetime, some maybe be a small one such as, “What is for dinner?” Others could be as big as, “Should I help this man or woman in this life-or- death situation?” When a person is faced with these decisions, sometimes there could be a lot going on in the processes of their minds. Ross and Nesbit have decided to prove that the inner processes of their minds might not be the only thing that aides in making decisions in certain situations. Their theory is tested in the essay “The power of Situations.” In this excerpt, the two authors decide to place the reader in a situation where a college student is faced with a situation where another person as fallen in a doorway. In this situation the student is faced with the decision to help the fallen person, or to go along with his day. Most people would think that the situation could be solved simply by merit, or simply by whether helping the person who fell would be a good thing to do or not. However, Ross and Nesbit decide to go beyond the choices of merit, and they decide to go into more aspects of the situation, such as if the student was running late or if he/she had a past of avoiding people who fell , or if the person who fell was ill, or drunk, or worse. These two proved that there were actually more factors of a situation than just merit alone. In this excerpt the two authors decide that more people would only help the fallen man if it won’t take them out of the way of their current task or tasks they were trying to complete. I agree with these two on that fact also. I believe that people, if placed in a situation such as the college student, would actually choose to help the fallen