Chance encounters can redirect entire life trajectories toward harm or good.

Evidence

People do many things planfully to shape the course their lives take. But chance events often influence their life paths. Indeed, some of the most important determinants of life paths occur through happenstance (Bandura, 1982; Merton & Barber, 2004). A book editor enters a hall as it rapidly fills up for a talk on the psychology of chance encounters and life paths. He seizes an empty chair near the entrance and ends up marrying the woman he happens to sit next to. With only a momentary change in time of entry seating, the arrangements would have changed, and their lives would have taken different courses. By chance, Diana, a compassionate and caring Voluntary International Service Assignments (VISA) volunteer, meets Howard, a cynical visiting American scholar, at a café in Guatemala City. Over conversations about the need for radical social change, he sets her on a path that leads to the Weather Underground. In a Greenwich Village townhouse, the explosion of a bomb she is making takes her life (Franks & Powers, 1970). Were it not for this chance meeting, Diana’s life would most likely have continued on a peaceful course. Later, in an analysis of moral disengagement in terrorism, we will examine the process of moral disengagement in this compassionate person. In these cases, a seemingly trivial, fortuitous event sets in motion constellations of influences that shape the direction of people’s life courses for better or worse. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 145

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The Diana-Weather Underground trajectory is a vivid narrative seed: a compassionate volunteer radicalized into a bomber through one café conversation.
• QUESTION: How much of a person’s moral architecture is set by random encounters as against dispositions? Worth chasing the Diana case details.