Lack of character? Situationism critiqued

Ethics

Volumn 115, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 535-562

  Sabini, John ^a   Silver, Maury ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 20444455952     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/428459     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. See John Doris, Lack of Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
2. Owen Flanagan, Variaties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991);
3. Gilbert Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999): 315-31;
4. Peter Vranas, "Respect for Persons: An Epistemic and Pragmatic Investigation" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001).
5. See Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
6. Rachana Kamtekar's ("Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character," Ethics 114 [2004]: 458-91) article on Doris's critique of virtue ethics appeared as our article was in final review. In light of this, we have addressed some points of convergence and divergence in footnotes, rather than in the body of our text.
7. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Christopher Rowe and Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
8. Doris allows that people have characters of a sort but, as we shall see, not of the right sort. Do Doris's arguments (and the data on which they are based) impugn ethics more generally, or are they relevant to virtue ethics alone? Doris thinks that his arguments do not impugn ethics more generally (Lack of Character, 107-8), But we believe that the standard interpretation of some of the social psychological findings which Doris reviews does impugn all forms of ethics. We believe that the standard interpretation denies the idea that behavior follows from beliefs, desires, and values. We shall have much to say about this.
9. For the most part, though not entirely, for the purposes of this article we grant the claim that if Doris's interpretation of the social psychological literature were correct, it would embarrass virtue ethics. Our aim is to show that Doris's interpretation is not correct. Compare Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics," for an in some ways parallel and in some ways divergent discussion of the same material. Kamtekar provides a more detailed discussion of virtue ethics per se.
10. The psychological version of this term is "situationalism."
11. Doris, Lack of Character, 2.
12. Of course, in fairness to Doris, these are only his first words on the topic, and his whole book might be seen as his attempt to clarify what he means. Yet he does advance this as, at least, a starting gloss, and we want to pause with it, just because it is so obviously true, to show just how lacking in implications it is.
13. See Doris, Lack of Character, 112-27.
14. Ibid., 22-26.
15. So Doris allows as how there might be people (perhaps even most people) who consistently exhibit virtuous conduct in a narrow range of circumstances: he is an honest fellow in terms of his paying his electric bill, or maybe even more generally, his utility bills. (See ibid., 62-71.)
16. The other philosophers in this movement tend to rely on the same data; see, e.g., Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology."
17. See John Sabini, Michael Siepmann, and Julia Stein, "The Really Fundamental Attributional Error in Social Psychological Research," Psychological Inquiry 12 (2000): 1-15;
18. and John Sabini and Maury Silver, "Internal and External Causes of Behavior," International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 2 (1987): 11-23. Of course it might be argued that there is no empirical reason whatsoever to believe in globalism; then the finding that there is a widespread illusion producing a belief in globalism is relevant. But as we shall argue below, following Abelson, there may well be enough empirical generality in behavior to sustain the notion that there really are some global traits. We agree, however, that people overestimate the degree of consistency in behavior.
19. See Doris, Lack of Character, 30-32;
20. Alice Izen and Paula Levin, "Effects of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 384-88.
21. Interestingly, being put in a bad mood can have positive effects on behavior too! (See John Sabini, Social Psychology, 2nd ed. [New York: Norton, 1995], for a review.)
22. See Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: Wiley, 1968), and
23. Introduction to Personality (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971).
24. See Hugh Hartshorne and M. A. May, Studies in the Nature of Character, vol. 1, Studies in Deceit (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
25. As Doris points out, children are not the ideal subjects to decide the question of whether adult character exists, but they are the best we have. Walter Mischel and Philip Peake, "Beyond Déjà Vu in the Search for Cross-Situational Consistency," Psychological Review 89 (1982): 730-55, reached the same conclusion about college students vis-à-vis the trait of conscientiousness.
26. Mischel, Personality and Assessment,
27. and Introduction to Personality.
28. As Doris points out, we do not have the data we really want to answer this question. We would want to have longitudinal data about the behavior of adults in ethically relevant circumstances in Which they did not know they were being evaluated. We just do not have those data, so we must make do with what we do have.
29. See Ziva Kunda and Richard Nisbett, "The Psychometrics of Everyday Life," Cognitive Psychology 18 (1996): 195-224.
30. See Dennis Jennings, Teresa Amabile, and Lee Ross, "Informal Co-variation Assessment Data-Based versus Theory-Based Judgments," in Judgments under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and Paul Slovick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
31. Of course it might be argued that baseball is a poor analogy to what we care about in terms of virtue ethics. Perhaps. But we discuss it here, as Abelson did, not to create an analogy but rather to make the more general point that even these small correlations can be of substance and worth noticing. However, in the next section we also discuss why correlations are not directly the right issue for virtue ethics. The point we want to make here is simply that believing in globalism is not entirely a matter of succumbing to an illusion.
32. See Robert Abelson, "A Variance Explanation Paradox: When a Little Is a Lot," Psychological Bulletin 97 (1985): 129-33.
33. See Seymour Epstein, "Aggregation and Beyond: Some Basic Issues on the Prediction of Behavior," Journal of Personality 51 (1983): 360-92;
34. and Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen, "Attitudes towards Objects as Predictors of Single and Multiple Behavioral Criteria," Psychological Review 81 (1974): 59-74.
35. Compare Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics," 482, on Plato, virtue, and consistency.
36. Doris, Lack of Character, 62-91 passim, also discusses the controversy in personality psychology about the utility of self-report measures of traits; i.e., can we learn much about people from asking them about themselves? We will pass on this topic, since it is about how we know who is honest, not whether there are honest people.
37. Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics," 485-84, too insists that virtues must recruit practical reasoning, which will sometimes lead to superficial inconsistencies in the service of important goals, such as our philanthropist's.
38. We shall not dispute here whether character and this conception of situationism could coexist; we will content ourselves with arguing that the data do not support this version of situationism. Compare Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics," for a discussion relevant to this point.
39. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper, 1974).
40. Of course someone may be skeptical about virtue ethics and the reality of character without being skeptical about beliefs, values, and desires. But it is difficult to sustain a belief in character if one is skeptical about behavior's being under the control of beliefs, desires, and values. The standard interpretation of these studies (see below the quotation from Ross and Nisbett concerning the Milgram demonstration) is that behavior in them (and by extension in morally important situations of everyday life) are under the control of subtle, situational forces rather than an agent's dispositions (beliefs, values, and desires). If the behavior seen here is under the control of situational forces, then, the argument goes, it is not under the control of beliefs, values, and desires and, therefore, it is not under the control of character. Our aim here is to defeat this string of claims by defeating the claim that the social influence studies demonstrate behavior that has escaped from control by beliefs, desires, and values.
41. Orne's famous "demand characteristic" account - that subjects continued to shock because they knew the shocks weren't real - is one attempt to take the first approach (Martin Orne, "On the Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment: With Particular Reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications," American Psychologist 17 [1962]: 776-83).
42. Space prevents us from discussing this here; suffice it to say that we find that approach wholly uncompelling. (See the debate about this in Arthur Miller, ed., The Social Psychology of Psychological Research [New York: Free Press, 1972].)
43. Suppose one believed, contrary to situationism, that people really are more inclined to obey authority than we had thought - despite Row and Nisbett's claim. What significance would the Milgram findings then have for our conception of character? Presumably, we would conclude that American character was far more authoritarian than we thought it was. This is indeed the conclusion reached by the Berkeley group, about fifteen years earlier than the Milgram studies, in their masterful volume on the authoritarian (originally fascist) personality (Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel Sanford, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality [Oxford: Harpers, 1950]). This might be a disheartening and even correct interpretation, but it was not the judgment reached by the scholarly community and, more important for our discussion, it would not have transformed our conception of character. It would have suggested that Americans had worse characters than we thought, rather than no characters. It is interesting to note, by the way, that Ross and Nisbett, two very hard-nosed experimental scientists, dismiss this interpretation of the results, not with data but with an anecdote, quoted below. Is there any better reason to reject the "authoritarianism" account of the results? We think so. People, when asked what they would do if placed in the experimental situation, overwhelmingly - almost unanimously - report that at some point (usually very early) they would refuse to obey. What should we make of these, obviously incorrect, assertions? Certainly, they are failed predictions, but we think they are something else too; they are statements of what people think they should do; in other words, they are statements of what people value. And they are our best reason for believing that in the Milgram experiment people do other than what they value, than what they believe they should do, than what their characters dictate, not, as the Berkeley group would have it, that people have different values. Further, Milgram made a film depicting a few of his subjects obeying and disobeying in the experiment Watching this film, one, as it were, feels the "situational forces" arising to oppose the subjects' desires to stop the experiment Watching the film convinces one that what does not happen is that subjects dispassionately decide what is more important to them, following the experimenter's commands to shock the victim or sparing the other subject pain, and then do what they decide is more important Rather, watching the film convinces one that the subjects do indeed act contrary to their dispositions. This causes people - Doris and others - to flee to situationism: the idea that subtle (what Doris might call capricious, unprincipled) aspects of the situation dictate behavior. It is what causes one to take refuge in the notion of subtle "situational forces." In the end, then, we are in agreement with Ross and Nisbett, Harman, and Doris, inter alia, that the Milgram obe dience experiments do not demonstrate that American character is more authoritarian than we thought, though it might well be. And we agree that "subtle situational forces" is an apt metaphor for what happens in the experiment But we insist that "subtle situational forces" is just that, a metaphor. We believe that before one can decide whether the operation of these forces reveals something new and different about human behavior, something not known to Aristotle and the tradition that follows him, something that significantly alters our conception of character, we need to be clear about what the subtle forces are.
44. See Ross and Nisbett, The Person and the Situation, 59.
45. Ross and Nisbett are not the only ones to use the metaphor of "forces." The Gestalt tradition which spawned these experiments relied extensively, both formally and informally, on this notion. Milgram himself uses the metaphor of "force fields" to describe and, perhaps, explain his results. Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics," 473, seems to accept an interpretation of the experiment in contrast to ours and to Ross and Nisbett's: that the subjects are torn between a disposition to obey and a disposition not to harm. We agree with Ross and Nisbett in dismissing this account.
46. Kinsey claimed, erroneously, as it turned out, that a majority of men by age forty had been unfaithful to their wives (Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male [Oxford: Saunders, 1948]). This "finding" did not lead to a reconsideration of our conception of character. Readers of Kinsey may have concluded that people, or men at least, have weaker characters then we thought, but not that character is an illusion. This is so, presumably, because though carnal desire may be a "situational force" and of no moral significance, it is hardly subtle.
47. The experimenter in Milgram's experiments was armed with rejoinders to subjects' protests. Some of the subjects captured in the film asked who was responsible, and if so, the experimenter replied mat he was (Stanley Milgram, Obedience: A fumed Report [New York: New York University Film Library, 1965]). Perhaps other subjects asked themselves this question and readied the same conclusion. Now here we face a threat to our conception of character. To those of us lucky enough not to be in the Milgram situation, the experimenter's claiming responsibility seems absurd. If the shocks were real, the subjects would be guilty of participating in the torture of an innocent victim; for all they knew, they might even have participated in manslaughter (at 350 volts the victim stops responding and for all the subject knows, and for all the subject knows the experimenter knows, the victim might be unconscious or even dead). The idea that people can participate in such activity and so easily paw off responsibility, moral responsibility, leaves very little as grounds to trust people. If people do not hold themselves responsible, then how can we trust them? But as we have said, the shedding of responsibility is something confined to those embedded in the situation; it seems right to think that the "subtle situational forces" that Ross and Nisbett allude to cause this shedding of responsibility and that this is one of the ways that obedience is produced. So it seems to us that the ease with which subjects in these studies come to see themselves as not responsible is part of what needs to be explained. We still want to know what the subtle situational forces are.
48. See John Sabini and Maury Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 69-71.
49. See Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor, 1967).
50. Two of his rejoinders were: The experiment requires that you continue. You have no choice; you must go on.
51. Similarly, when two peer subjects taking part in the experimental session with them refused to continue, so too did a large majority, though not all, of the subjects (90 percent).
52. See Sabini and Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life, 35-55.
53. I b i d.
54. In one condition in which there was no authority ordering escalation, some subjects did forcibly come to the victim's aid directly. They confronted a confederate in the absence of an authority.
55. Solomon Asch, Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One against a Unanimous Majority, Psychological Monographs 70, no. 9, whole no. 416 (Washington: American Psychological Association, 1956).
56. Marie Jahoda, "Conformity and Independence," Human Relations 12 (1959): 99-120.
57. Interestingly, the one place that one does not see such conformity to the group's opinion is in matters explicitly labeled as taste. See Sabini and Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life, for more on this.
58. Jeb Stuart Magruder, a well-brought-up young lawyer and an avid supporter of Nixon's moral majority, found himself one fine day in the office of the attorney general of the United States, hearing a presentation, in the presence of the attorney general himself, of a variety of illegal things the Republicans might do to insure reelection of Richard Nixon. The least unimaginable of these activities was bugging the campaign headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate Hotel. Magruder thought the attorney general would throw the person putting on the presentation (G. Gordon Liddy) out, but he didn't. Instead he approved the least offensive of the illegalities. At that moment, according to Magruder, he lost his moral compass. Such is the power of authority.
59. Bibb Latané and John Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970).
60. Doris discusses this experiment in his review of research relevant to compassion, but as we have indicated, subjects' own skins are at risk in this study, which indicates that whatever the forces are in this experiment, they are not relevant just to compassion.
61. John Darley and C. Daniel Batson, "From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100-108.
62. Ibid., 102.
63. Kamtekar treats the same experimental results by accepting that the seminarians in a hurry chose to be on time rather than to help the victim; she argues that this should not upset virtue ethicists, since regardless of their choice they are being helpful - either to the person in the doorway or to the experiment But shouldn't the subjects see that one is more important than the other? Doris realizes that this failure to perceive the obvious also needs to be explained.
64. We do not mean to suggest by this that if people were given the choice "Obey and continue to shock that fellow or face five minutes of embarrassment," they would elect to continue to obey, and we certainly don't mean to suggest that if they were to choose explicitly between risking burning up in a fire or being embarrassed by losing their cool, they would choose burning up in the fire. Rather, we suggest that when people are already confused by what seem to be different perceptions of reality, when reality does not admit of different perceptions, then embarrassment inhibits them from acting without their articulating to themselves that they really have nothing to fear but embarrassment.
65. We do not, however, share Doris's concerns about people's motivational self-knowledge. We do not think that people are in general ignorant of why they are doing what they are doing, but we do think that embarrassment is a motive that people underestimate. For those readers who would like to get a better sense of what confronting people feels like, even though this confrontation is different from the morally fraught confrontation in the obedience experiment, we call attention to this: in the early 1970s Milgram assigned students in his graduate seminar to go into the New York City subway system and very politely ask seated passengers, "Excuse me, may I have your seat?" It turns out that for many people this is a very difficult thing to do; indeed it was for Milgram, who remarked that when he tried to do it he finally understood what it felt like for his subjects to try to confront the experimenter (see Stanley Milgram and John Sabini, "On Maintaining Urban Norms," in Advances in Environmental Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Andrew Baum, Jerome Singer, and Stuart Valins [Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978]).
66. But what of the failure of personality measures to predict behavior? Well, first of all, in the Milgram experiment authoritarianism does predict behavior (Thomas Blass, "Understanding Behavior in the Milgram Obedience Experiment: The Role of Personality, Situations, and Their Interactions," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 [1991]: 398-413;
67. and Alan Elms and Stanley Milgram, "Personality Characteristics Associated with Obedience and Defiance toward Authoritative Commands," Journal of Experimental Research in Personality 1 [1966]: 282-89). And, indeed, it has been argued that personality variables predict obedience better than do situational variables. But beyond that, we have suggested that in all of these experiments subjects want to, are inclined to, are disposed to do the right thing, but they are inhibited. Researchers have sought to find variation in people's desires to do the right thing: in the Latané and Darley experiments, e.g., researchers look for differences in people's sense of responsibility, believing that those with a greater sense of responsibility would be more likely to help. But suppose that everyone desired to help; perhaps what distinguished those who helped from those who didn't was not how much they wanted to help, but how inhibited they were by embarrassment If that is where the variance is in helping, then the measures that have been applied were measuring the wrong things. Kamtekar, similarly, points out that although most subjects want to do the right thing, deciding under pressure just what the right thing might be is a difficult achievement that requires a degree of practical wisdom that, apparently, most people lack, especially when coming to the right conclusion involves disregarding usually reliable social cues.
68. Of course there is a diverse set of things which affect moods: finding a dime in a coin return, being given a cookie, being given a tiny note pad, being told one is creative, reading self-affirming sentences (even knowing they were not written about you). The sun's being out And people in good moods are kinder and gentler than those not in good moods, but we reject these small effects as support of situationism.
69. Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics" (491), reaches essentially the same conclusion.
70. A question remains: does our narrow conception save virtue ethics? Advocates of virtue ethics have always understood that the application of virtue requires the exercise of practical intelligence (Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics, " 479-84 passim). We think that the import of the social influence studies is that the exercise of practical intelligence is, in specific circumstances, harder than the commonsence view expects. This fact might give us reason to believe that virtuous characters are rarer than we might have imagined, but it does not trouble the notion of character or show that virtue is unattainable.