University of Groningen
Vice Versa
Bates, Thomas Edward
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Bates, T. E. (2016). Vice Versa: Situationism and character pessimism Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit
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Chapter
2
Situationism
2.1
Introduction
In this chapter, I will show, in detail, how situationists see the empirical record as
grounding a serious challenge to the idea of character and character traits that they
take to be widely in use. In describing this challenge I will make clear exactly what
the central claims of situationism are, exactly how these contradict or undermine
the notions of character they challenge and how the data are taken to support
the situationist’s critique of character. Whilst I will at times refer to situationism
as a single position – in philosophy – and to ‘the situationist’ as a proponent of
that position, there are a number of authors who have taken up that stance and
each has a somewhat different focus on the data, and how it challenges notions of
character. I will clarify the differences between these views. This is not to deny
that there are core themes to the view which all situationists buy in to, such that
if one does not hold that belief one is not a situationist. I will also make these
themes explicit.
Philosophical situationism – the position I am interested in – is firmly rooted
in a paradigm of psychology, which is sometimes called situationalism. I will
endeavour to be clear when discussing authors who are in the psychological
tradition, but when I say ‘the situationist’ I am talking about a proponent of
philosophical situationism.
There has already been a heated back-and-forth between situationists and those
who oppose the position (see Merritt, Doris, and Harman 2010; Alfano 2013; Miller
2014 for useful overviews). This has produced refinements on both sides of the
debate. In this chapter I will only be focusing on the situationist position, not on
those who criticise the view.
In section 2, I will give a detailed account of where philosophical situationism
came from. In section 3, I review important parts of the empirical basis of
situationism. In section 4, I will distinguish the different positions that are
defended by situationists.
9
Situationism
2.2
The Roots of Situationism
Philosophical situationism arose from the tension growing between an empirical
trend in moral psychology and a resurgence in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in
moral theory. Sparked by Elizabeth Anscombe’s biting critique of “modern moral
philosophy” (1958), a growing research program in virtue ethics had been
enjoying a renaissance in the latter half of the 20th century (for example, Foot
1978; McDowell 1979; MacIntyre 1984; Williams 1985). This return to some of
the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers, in particular to the idea of virtue as
a central moral concept, was driven by the claim that the concepts currently in
play in moral philosophy, concepts like ‘the good’ and ‘the right’, suffered from
the fact that they are purely evaluative in nature. In part, then, Anscombe’s
appeal was for moral philosophers to bring back more descriptively ‘thick’ ethical
concepts, which would tie ethical theory more closely to the world of moral
decision-making and action. Labelling an action as dishonest rather than wrong,
for example, tells us not only its moral valence, but also points to the feature of
the action in virtue of which it has that valence. In terms of moral guidance – a
central goal of ethical theories – one does much better to instruct an agent to act
honestly, then simply to act well, or do the right thing. To be sure, it does not
point out the specific honest action one should perform, but we are all – it might
be thought – au fait with common examples of honesty relating to our particular
experience of the world, which could guide us in facing the particular challenges
we come across. This thought, alongside the specific and dramatic claim that, “it
is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid
aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology”
(Anscombe 1958, 1) led proponents of the resurgent virtue ethics to claim for
themselves the advantage of having a more adequate moral psychology than its
theoretical competitors, namely consequentialism and deontology.
On the other hand, within psychology a heated debate between personality
psychologists and social psychologists was addressing precisely the sort of
empirical data which might be of interest to ethical theorists concerned with
having an adequate philosophy of psychology. The debate focused on the
existence of personality traits in humans and the question of whether and to
what extent such traits play a causal role in behaviour (see Mischel 1968 for a
key early text; see Funder 2001 for a retrospective overview of this debate from
the perspective of personality psychology).
This empirical challenge to
personality traits represented the original version of situationism, as it was found
in psychology. This position forms the basis of philosophical situationism, as
both positions argue that on the basis of behavioural evidence we should focus
on the causal power of situational influences rather than on agential traits.
However, only philosophical situationism takes the notions of ‘virtue’, ‘vice’, and
‘character’ to be its target. Situationists in psychology are very reluctant to
address these morally loaded notions. Whilst the personality-situation debate
still exists today, in a modified form, and some of the original voices in that
debate (e.g., Walter Mischel) have since decried the strict dichotomy between
situationism (in psychology) and dispositionalism – the view that personal
10
The Roots of Situationism
dispositions, or traits, play a significant role in behaviour – it would not be
controversial to say that the academic field of personality psychology has suffered
“permanent damage” as a result of the personality-situation debate (Funder 2001,
213).
The meeting of these two diverse streams of research came about through the
foundation of philosophical situationism at the turn of the century, in work by
Owen Flanagan (1991), John Doris (1998, 2002), and Gilbert Harman (1999,
2000, 2001, 2009). This line of research was then taken up by other writers such
as Maria Merritt (2000, 2009), Peter Vranas (2005, 2009), and Mark Alfano
(2013). These authors were convinced by the claim that behaviour was to a great
extent the product of situational factors rather than flowing from personal
dispositions. This finding, they would go on to claim, is seriously problematic for
ethical theories that place notions of character as central to discussions of ethical
evaluation, action guidance, and moral judgment. Thus the dialectic is set up,
with philosophical situationism offering a challenge directly to the rejuvenated
field of virtue ethics. The force of their attack is especially stinging as it is, so to
speak, on the virtue ethicists’ home turf; the challenge is one of empirical
inadequacy, attacking precisely the advantage that these theorists had claimed
for themselves over their theoretical competitors.
Given this genealogy we can easily understand situationism as a challenge to
virtue ethics, but that is not the whole story. As a challenge to ethical theorists,
situationism presses the need for an adequate moral psychology, and in particular
for an empirically adequate account. This challenge is not specific to virtue ethics.
Any empirical claims or assumptions in an ethical theory must meet a burden
of empirical adequacy. If that burden cannot be met, this will count against the
theory, just as much as if it suffers from internal tensions, or intuitive implausibility
(Timmons 2002, 271). In the particular case of situationism, then, any theory
which relies on empirically inadequate notions of character has some work to do.
They can revise their theory, they can challenge situationism, or they can revise
their claim to empirical adequacy.
Situationism should not only be understood as making a contribution to
discussions of ethical theory. It has a stake in the language we use about our
characters in the real world as well. Consider the following claims: “Captain
Jones is a brave woman”; “Professor Higgins is a considerate person”; “My
parents were kind people”; “I am a coward”; “You are a really generous person”.
Whatever else these statements might be doing – making people feel good about
themselves, for example – they also seem to be making claims about the people
in question. These terms – brave, considerate, kind, coward, and generous – are
‘thick’ in the sense noted above, they have both an evaluative dimension and a
descriptive aspect. This latter part means that the claims can be incorrect, even
if our positive or negative evaluation of the person in question remains. There is,
of course, an open question as to whether such statements should be taken as
making strong descriptive claims. It could be that the evaluative part of the
statement, or something else, is its primary function, such that the discovery
that the apparent descriptive claim is false would not lead the speaker to alter
the statement – as they did not intend to primarily make a descriptive claim in
11
Situationism
the first place. For now I wish to set those thoughts aside and simply state that
these kinds of claims made in everyday social discourse also seem to face the
challenge of situationism. If we believe, and claim, that people have certain traits
of character, then we should be interested in evidence which suggests we are
mistaken. This, in turn, might lead us to radically rethink some of our social
practices. Consider, for example, the practice of character witnesses in a court of
law, or personal references for job applications. If we make claims about people’s
character traits that turn out to be dubious, then we might become motivated to
change these practices accordingly.
So there are two broad targets for the situationist challenge: ethical theories
that employ potentially suspect notions of character, and everyday beliefs and
language about one another’s character. Naturally the way these two targets are
affected by the situationist critique will differ somewhat, but there is a core to
situationism that motivates both challenges. In the next section, I will discuss
some of the evidence which forms the basis of the situationist challenge. Then,
in sections 4 and 5, I will elaborate on several different versions of situationism
whilst also making clear what the core beliefs of that view are.
2.3
The Evidence
Situationism’s challenge to character is an empirical one. It is an argument based
on the empirical record amassed by numerous psychology experiments. There
are many findings which comprise this empirical data set, and I will not attempt
to give a complete review of these findings (for relevant overviews, see Ross and
Nisbett 1991, Doris 2002, Miller 2013, 2014). Nonetheless, it is important for the
reader to grasp the nature of these experiments and why exactly they convince
situationists to be sceptical of certain kinds of character. In this section, I will
describe some aspects of the empirical literature in detail in order to achieve this
task. I will be selective in what I discuss, so the reader might be concerned that
I am selecting only those findings which will be useful for my own arguments. I
will indeed refer to the evidence described below when discussing the merits of
situationism in later chapters, but this evidence is representative of the empirical
tradition usually cited in support of situationism. Milgram’s studies, for example,
are described by Doris as “powerful evidence for situationism” (2002, 39). Whilst
I will introduce other empirical work to support my arguments in later chapters,
my intention is to present the core empirical evidence for this dissertation here.
I will describe some key trends in the data set: the ‘mood effect’, the ‘bystander
effect’, and some other relevant findings which I will rely on later. I will begin,
however, with a discussion of one of the most infamous series of experiments –
and one which is discussed by nearly everyone who writes on this debate – Stanley
Milgram’s ‘obedience experiments’.
2.3.1
Milgram’s Obedience Experiments
During this series of meticulously planned and carefully adjusted experiments
Stanley Milgram (1974) sought to investigate how ordinary people would react to
12
The Evidence
authority figures issuing morally problematic instructions. He wanted to know
about the phenomenon of obedience to authority, in light of the atrocities
committed by the Nazis during the holocaust. In particular, he was interested in
discovering under what conditions a subject would obey or disobey an authority
figure. The role of obedience in binding individuals to authority structures in
society is of great importance, and Milgram notes (1974, 4) that the ethics of
obedience and disobedience has been a topic of discussion at least since Plato.
However, as an empirical scientist, Milgram wanted to understand where the
tipping points are when one’s individual conscience comes into conflict with the
instructions of authority. To do so he set up an experiment in which the two
would become increasingly in tension with one another, in order to identify the
point at which the subject becomes disobedient to the authority.
Under the guise of being an experiment testing the effect of punishment on
learning, Milgram had subjects play the role of a ‘teacher’ who would be
administering electric shocks of increasing strength to a ‘learner’ – an actor, or
confederate, who was working with Milgram – each time they failed to correctly
answer a word-pair memory question. In order to ensure the reality of the
shocks, the subjects were given a 45-volt shock from the machine before the
experiment proper began. Moreover, as they gave increasingly severe shocks they
were required to read out the voltage, which served to remind them of the
severity. The victim would provide incorrect answers on a schedule of roughly
three wrong answers to one correct. This meant that the level of shocks being
administered increased regularly and sharply. The impressive setting of Yale
University, the authoritative figure of the white-coated experimenter, and the
learner’s volunteering for the experiment provided little, if any, reason to disobey
the experimenter initially. However, the situation would rapidly change into one
in which the subject was mediating the instructed punishment of the authority
onto a now unwilling victim, despite his screams of pain. Surprisingly, the
authority figure was able to maintain this obedience simply by a series of verbal
prompts. These four prompts would be used in response to the subject asking
whether or not to continue or protesting that they would not do so. The prompts
were as follows:
1. Please continue, or, Please go on.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on. (Milgram 1974, 23)
Only if a lower prompt were unsuccessful would the authority move on to the
next. Only if a subject continued to protest after the fourth prompt would the
experiment be terminated. If the subject asked about permanent physical damage
to the learner, the authority would answer, “Although the shocks may be painful,
there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on” (ibid.). If they stated the
subject did not want to continue the response was, “Whether the learner likes it
13
Situationism
or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please
go on” (24).
An important part of the experiments is the feedback the subject received
from the learner. In the initial set-up the learner was in an isolated room, and the
only feedback received was a thumping on the wall after the 300-volt mark. From
the second experiment onwards this was changed to voice feedback, so that the
learner could more explicitly express his removal of consent. In the voice feedback
conditions the learner displayed increasing agitation. He first grunted at 75 volts,
then, at 120 volts, he would shout that the shocks were becoming painful. At
150 volts he would shout, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the
experiment any more! I refuse to go on!” (25). Up until 300 volts his screams
became more severe and he continued to insist that he be let out. At that point
he shouted that he would no longer provide answers, but, having been prompted
by the authority, subjects would continue to administer shocks if no answer was
given. At 330 volts the subject was not heard from again and no lights appeared
on the signal box to indicate the learner’s chosen answer. Subjects who continued
to be obedient were instructed to continue to the highest voltage – 450 – at which
level they administered two additional rounds of shocks before the experimenter
terminated the test.
The set-up of the experiment placed the subject in a situation where they
faced an avoidance-avoidance decision. Each of two options available to them –
disobeying the direct request of an authority figure or issuing an electric shock to an
innocent stranger – was unattractive, producing an avoidance tendency. The skill
of Milgram’s manipulations of the experimental set-up allowed him to precisely
identify which factors were causing behavioural changes in the subjects, in other
words, which factors led subjects to resolve this avoidance-avoidance dilemma one
way or the other. This will become clear when we pay closer attention to his
results.
In the initial experiment, despite the fact that most subjects objected numerous
times, and all subjects questioned the authority figure about continuing at least
once, 65% continued until the experiment was terminated by the experimenter.
This figure turned out to be remarkably robust. Over many replications of the
standard Milgram experiment “two-thirds obedient, everywhere the experiment
has been tried, is a fair summary” (Brown 1986, 4).
If the reader finds these levels of obedience surprising, they are not alone.
Milgram asked a series of people – psychologists, students, and members of the
public – to make predictions about their own levels of obedience in the experiment
having had the details of it explained to them. All predicted that they would be
disobedient before the 300-volt mark, and the general prediction was that only a
pathological fringe – 1-2% - would be fully obedient. Additionally, Milgram had
a number of people observe the experiment whilst it was in progress. In that way
they were able to fully grasp the situational forces in play. Nevertheless, they
expressed extreme surprise at the continued obedience of subjects. An interesting
conclusion to come out of these experiments, then, was that we can be very poor
at perceiving what forces affect our behaviour, and, in particular, the strength of
those forces. As a result we can be seriously mistaken in our predictions of our
14
The Evidence
own behaviour, and that of others.
Having established a base-line condition in which 65% of subjects routinely
remain obedient, Milgram ran a series of further tests in which aspects of the
experimental set-up were changed in order to identify which of these factors had
an impact on behaviour. The features he varied included more specific protests
from the learner (including complaints about his heart), variation in the person
who played the learner, proximity of the authority, gender of subjects, prior
conditions stated by learner, the setting of the experiment, and giving the
subjects the freedom to choose the shock level. In addition to these there were
two main sets of variants that Milgram investigated: proximity of the learner and
role-permutations. As can be seen in the table below (a composite of the tables
given in Milgram 1974), changes in many of the variables had an impact on the
subjects’ behaviour:
Experiment
No.
Variable
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
13a.3
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
Remote
Voice-Feedback
Proximity
Touch-proximity
New Base-line
Change of Personnel
Experimenter Absent
Women
Enters with Prior Conditions
Office Building, Bridgport
Subject Chooses Shock Level
Learner Demands to Be Shocked
Ordinary Man Gives Orders
Subject as Bystander
Authority as Victim
Two Authorities: Contradictory Commands
Two Authorities: One as Victim
Two Peers Rebel
Peer Administers Shocks
Mean of the
maximum
shock level 1
27.0
24.53
20.80
17.88
24.55
22.20
18.15
24.73
21.40
20.95
5.50
10.0
16.25
24.9
10.0
10.0
23.5
16.45
28.65
Percentage
administering
maximum shock
65.0%
62.5%
40.0%
30.0%
65.0%
50.0%
20.5%
65.0%
40.0%
47.5%
2.5%
0.0%
20.0%
68.75%
0.0%
0.0%
65.0%
10.0%
92.5%
2
I shall return to some of these results later when I consider how situationists have
taken these experiments to support their position, but for now it is worth noting
some main trends. The first is that increased proximity of the learner to the
subject decreases their willingness to continue administering shocks. The other is
that certain role permutations – such as the authority swapping places with the
learner (experiment 14) – have a dramatic impact on behaviour, whereas others –
an authority figure taking the role of the learner, whilst another authority runs the
1 Shock level ranges from 1 – 30. Starting at 15 volts each level increases by 15 volts up to
450 volts, which is level 30.
2 This column is sometimes labelled as ‘Percentage Obedient’ by Milgram. Needless to say, all
who were obedient administered the maximum shock level, but in some variants of the experiment
administering that level didn’t constitute obedience, so this label is more accurate for the data
viewed as a whole.
3 Those subjects who refused to continue with the ordinary man’s instructions in experiment
13 were then asked by the man to record the shock durations, as he would take over administering
the shocks. 13a records how many of these subjects were willing to let the man continue the
experiment. 68.75% of them did not interfere with his administering the maximum shock level.
15
Situationism
experiment (16) – produces the same levels of obedience as the base-line condition.
Other changes, such as the location of the experiment, the perceived personality
of the learner, or the prior conditions variant, have some impact on obedience,
but it is not dramatic. Taken as a whole, however, the experiment is a staple of
the situationist literature because it shows how manipulations of the experimental
setting can lead to clear variations in the subjects’ behaviour. Moreover, it shows
that people’s predictions of their own and other people’s behaviour in such a
situation can be radically mistaken.
2.3.2
The Bystander Effect
Much of the experimental work looking at the effect of situational inputs on
behaviour seeks to measure the willingness of subjects to offer help when there is
an apparent need. One important subset of these experiments looks at the role of
inactive bystanders in influencing the level of help offered by subjects in just such
circumstances. These findings support what has come to be known as the
‘bystander effect’, or sometimes the ‘group effect’.
Consider the following case, which is indicative of the general finding that
people’s behaviour is affected by the presence of inactive bystanders. Bibb
Latané and John Darley (1968) had subjects fill out a questionnaire in a small
waiting room. Whilst they were doing this a stream of smoke was introduced
into the room via a wall vent. The experimenters measured the length of time
the subjects took before leaving the room to report the smoke. The variable they
introduced was that in some cases the subject was alone, whilst in others there
were two confederates also filling in questionnaires. The confederates attempted
to avoid conversation as much as possible, and showed active disinterest in the
smoke.4 Of those subjects who were alone 75% reported the smoke, usually after
an investigation of the vent and the smoke more closely. Of the subjects who
were with the unresponsive bystanders only 10% (1 of the 10 subjects) reported
the smoke. The others continued with the questionnaire as the room filled up
with smoke, often waving away the fumes, coughing, rubbing their eyes, and
opening a window (218). An interesting secondary finding of the experiment is
that the median time taken for subjects to notice the smoke when alone was less
than 5 seconds, but with the confederates was 20 seconds. The authors explain
this in terms of the constraints felt in public places – whilst alone people tend to
glance around themselves quite freely, but in groups people tend to look down or
focus on something in particular, perhaps to avoid appearing rudely inquisitive
(219). This shows that being in a group also lessens people’s attentiveness to
their surroundings. It should be noted that this does not account for the lower
rate of reporting; rather, it is a second and distinct effect. In post-experiment
interviews subjects who had reported the smoke generally said that they were
not sure of its origins but thought it was a good idea to check it out. Those who
had not done so reported that they had rejected the idea that it was a fire, often
4 Having stared briefly at the smoke they shrugged their shoulders and continued with the
questionnaire. If engaged in conversation by the subject they responded “I dunno”. No subjects
persisted in talking to them (217).
16
The Evidence
claiming they thought it was steam or air-conditioning vapours. Two subjects
(from different groups) even thought that the smoke was “truth gas” designed to
improve the subject’s performance on the questionnaire (Latané and Darley
1970, 52)! Whilst some reported that they thought it was “some sort of
experiment” (ibid.), which led them to simply endure the event, none reported
that the presence of the bystanders had influenced their decision to act.
This effect has been consistently found in experimental settings with a similar
set-up, where the central variable has been the presence or absence of passive
bystanders. In an earlier work (Darley and Latané 1968) the same authors found
that people’s inclination to help can be affected by the perception that there
is someone else present, even if they are not located in the same place. Under
the pretence of interviews about personal problems associated with college life,
the experimenters had students participate in a discussion over an intercom (to
prevent embarrassment). During the discussion one of the other subjects appeared
to have a seizure, and the dependent variable was the speed with which the subjects
reported the emergency. The key variable was the number of other students the
subjects believed were involved in the discussion (378). The experimenter had –
under the guise of ensuring an uninhibited discussion – removed himself from the
discussion, so the subjects did not believe that an authority figure was aware of
the emergency. Moreover the discussion was organized in such a way that each
‘student’ would have 2 minutes to talk, during which time all the other microphones
were switched off. This ensured that the subjects could not know what response,
if any, the other students in the discussion were having. During the first round of
talking, the victim indicated with embarrassment that under stress he was prone
to seizures. After a complete round of input from the single subject and the other
pre-recorded statements, the victim – also pre-recorded – spoke again. This time,
after a few comments he began to speak more loudly and incoherently. Though
stuttering, he began asking for help, then indicated that he was “having a real
problem”, asked for help again, and between choking noises claimed that “I’m
gonna die”, before falling quiet (379). The subjects in the experiment were led
to believe that they were in groups of 2 (subject and victim), 3 (subject, victim,
bystander), or 6 (subject, victim, four bystanders). 85% of subjects in groups of 2
responded by the end of the fit, 62% in groups of 3 did so, and 31% of subjects in
groups of 6. Moreover every subject in the 2-person group scenario reported the
emergency within the 6-minute time limit, but only 62% of those in the 6-person
group did so.
Group size also affected the speed of response. 60 seconds after the beginning of
the fit roughly 30% of subjects in the 6-person group had reported the emergency,
roughly 60% of those in the 3-person group had, and roughly 85% of those in the 2group setting had. After 120 seconds those numbers are approximately 55%, 75%
and 95% respectively. Those numbers rose slightly by 160 seconds, but levelled
out at that point. Whilst in a real situation the victim would likely receive help
in every case – as the number of potential reporters compensates for the lower
likelihood of reporting in the group – it is worthy of note that their chances of
receiving help quickly are much higher if there is only one bystander than a group
of 5 others. In cases where speed is of the essence, we might be better off with
17
Situationism
just a singleton helper available.
Subjects had completed personality measure tests, but neither differences in
personality nor differences in the gender or qualifications of the other purported
bystanders had an impact on rates of helping. Those who did report the emergency
seemed concerned but not panicked, whereas those who did not report it seemed
much more agitated when the experimenter entered the room, often immediately
asking if “he’s all right” or asking “Is he being taken care of?” (382). The authors
hypothesized that subjects had not chosen not to respond, but rather were trapped
between two urges; the impulse to help, and the reticence to leave the experimental
setting, invade the privacy of the victim, or make fools of themselves by overreacting. It is interesting to note that this conflict of motivations mirrors the
conflict in Milgram’s experiments. It is not clearly an avoidance-avoidance conflict
here, however, as the motivation to help does not appear to be an avoidance
(although they may want to avoid censure or personal distress at doing nothing).
Moreover, the motivation not to act could be the product of a desire to complete the
task at hand, rather than leaving the experimental setting. So there are possible
motivations on both sides which might be avoidance based, and motivations which
might be attraction based, i.e. wanting to help, or wanting to complete the task.
The fact that personality measures were no predictor of helping behaviour
undermines a common response to inactive bystanders during a tragedy: that
they are alienated, dehumanized, or psychopathic. Situationists argue that these
findings show that anyone can fail to act in an emergency if the situational setting
is a particular way. It is not to do with personal flaws, they will argue, but having
the right (or wrong) kind of situational support. If the findings of these sorts of
experiments are correct, these moralizing judgments we make – to help explain
how such shocking failures can occur, and perhaps to reassure ourselves that we
would act differently – miss their mark. Rather, the presence of other people seems
to have a stultifying effect on us, whether we see their inaction or not.5
I claimed earlier that the group effect was well supported with experimental
evidence. The range of experiments aimed at understanding the effect and its
boundary conditions is captured in a meta-analysis by Latané and Nida (1981), in
which they document the various tests and discuss the key explanatory features
of the effect. Drawing on Latané and Darley’s 1970 monograph, they claim that
there are three psychological processes – social influence, audience inhibition, and
diffusion of responsibility – that lead bystanders to be less likely to act when others
are present (309). The bystander is in the unenviable position, it is claimed, of
facing two unpleasant alternatives, both of which naturally produce an avoidance
response. These are the act of helping in an emergency itself, which comes with
a number of costs (and surely we cannot know the number or extent of the costs
to us when we act), and few rewards. The other is the act of not helping, which
comes with embarrassment, guilt, possible social condemnation, and so on.
5 This particular experiment was discussed in the light of the murder of Kitty Genovese in
New York City in the 1960s. Since that time the reporting of the facts of that case has come
under scrutiny and it seems now that the bystanders were not so horribly culpable as initially
thought. Nevertheless, the experiment itself stands as good evidence of the extent of damage the
effect can cause, given that nearly all subjects took the situation to be real and thus, so far as
they knew, their inaction risked the death of an innocent.
18
The Evidence
Latané and Darley describe a number of steps necessary for someone to help
in such an emergency. They must first notice that something is happening, then
interpret it as an emergency, then decide that they have a responsibility to help,
then consider what form of help can be offered, before finally implementing the
action (1970, 31-32). During the decision process any of the psychological
mechanisms mentioned above might play a role. In a group, a person runs the
risk of embarrassment if they act on a situation they have misinterpreted, the
larger the group the greater the potential embarrassment. In this way the
audience inhibits action. Moreover, the reactions of others help us to define the
event that is occurring. This social influence on our perception of the event
makes it appear less critical or at least more ambiguous when others are inactive.
Indeed, we might judge that inaction is the expected pattern of behaviour.
Finally, the presence of others provides a means of reducing the psychological
cost of non-intervention through the diffusion of responsibility amongst the
group. All three processes, it is claimed, are necessary to account fully for the
social inhibition of helping (Latané and Nida, 1981, 309).
As with Milgram’s studies, the experiments that make up the bystander effect
are a great example of the evidence the situationists take to support their thesis,
because there are so many variations which complement each other. In this way,
common themes can be recognised as important, and explanatory theories built.
It is well established, then, that the presence of inactive bystanders has a robust
dampening effect on people’s inclinations to help. The situationist takes this
finding to be important because it shows how a seemingly innocuous, and
apparently morally irrelevant feature, of the situation can have a significant
impact on how people act in morally relevant ways. The difference between
helping someone in need or not might come down to whether one is alone or part
of an inactive group. This finding is worrying for character theorists, the
situationist says, because it seems to undermine the idea that some people have
the character trait of ‘helpfulness’ and others do not. Being helpful, they claim,
seems to be much more dependent on external factors than we had previously
thought.
2.3.3
The Mood Effect
Keeping with the theme of reporting on general trends in the empirical work,
another interesting set of findings which plays a key role in supporting situationism
are those which measured the effect of manipulating mood on behaviour, primarily
helping behaviour. One such example which is often used is the so called ‘dime
experiment’ run by Alice Isen and Paula Levin (1972), in which the experimenters
manipulated the mood of the subjects by having one group of them find a dime
in the coin return slot of a payphone. Both this group and a control group,
who did not find the dime, were then faced with the opportunity to offer help
to a confederate who ‘accidentally’ dropped her papers on the ground. Isen and
Levin reported that those who had found the dime were considerably more likely
to help than those who did not. Perhaps because of the striking difference in
helping – only 1 person out of 25 who did not find the dime helped and only 2
19
Situationism
people out of 16 who found the dime did not – this experiment is often cited in
support of situationism. Such a minor thing as finding a dime is surely irrelevant to
whether or not we should help, and yet it appears to make a significant difference.
The experiment, however, is rather controversial, in that an attempted replication
found no significant difference between those who found the dime and those who
did not (Blevins and Murphy 1974, 326). It is therefore unfortunate that this study
is offered as representative of the mood effect. There are indeed many studies that
show the effect of mood manipulation on behaviour, but we should not take the
strength of the effect indicated in Isen and Levin’s result to be representative.
In recent work, Christian Miller has discussed data which shows a
relationship between manipulating feelings of guilt and helping behaviour (2013,
29-56), feelings of empathy and helping (2013, 102-130), and a number of other
similar relationships. In light of these findings, this section might more aptly be
called ‘the affect effect’, as some of these kinds of affect are not clearly moods.
However, given that discussion of this phenomenon has so far been held using the
terminology of mood, I will follow this trend. Nonetheless, it is worth bearing in
mind that the relationship between manipulations of people’s affective states and
their behaviour seems to be wider than just mood manipulation. Indeed, the
breadth of this effect is so substantial that it is not clear that it should be
classified under just one term. Consider that both positive and negative changes
in mood have an impact on behaviour; in both cases they tend to lead to
increased helping behaviour. In a helpful review of this literature, Mark Schaller
and Robert Cialdini (1990) note that the positive and negative moods under
discussion should be thought of as ‘happiness’ and ‘sorrow’. These are temporary
mood states, they say, and should be distinguished from other positive moods
such as pride, and other negative states such as anger, frustration and guilt
(266). The temporary part is also important. The triggers used in the
experiments lead to a short-term feelings of happiness or sorrow, so it is not clear
that a person experiencing chronic depression, or having a ‘happy disposition’
will frequently display helping behaviour. This is in line with the idea that it is
changes in these states which lead to changes in behaviour.
Now, there can be any number of situational factors which trigger the
changes in mood. Experimenters have produced positive moods with situational
manipulations such as pleasant smells (Baron and Thomley 1994), pleasant
weather (Cunningham 1979), listening to soothing music (Fried and Berkowitz
1979), and being labelled a charitable person (Kraut 1973). Negative moods have
been triggered by factors such as loud noises in the proximity (Mathews and
Canon 1975) and the recall or imagining of sad events. It is clear, then, that
there are many situational factors which can influence our behaviour via a
change in our affective states, but it is not so clear exactly why this happens. It
is an ongoing project for psychologists interested in these findings to determine
which model best captures the relation between changes in affective states and
behavioural changes.
The experiments that make up the literature on the mood effect – and those
further studies which examine the relationship of guilt, empathy, embarrassment
and elation to helping, to name but a few – constitute a key part of the empirical
20
The Evidence
work which situationists appeal to. This is because the situational factors which
trigger changes in affect appear to be very insignificant. They tend to fly under
the radar of our awareness (people do not report that the nice smell of cookies put
them in a good mood when asked why they helped), and they appear to be morally
insignificant. This all plays into the situationist claim that our behaviour is, to
a far greater extent than we expected, the product of insignificant and irrelevant
situational factors, and not the product of stable traits of character
2.3.4
Fragmentation and Helping
Whilst many of the experiments cited by situationists seem to reveal that people
are capable of acting quite badly much of the time – e.g. electrocuting an
innocent learner, or failing to help someone having a seizure – there are other
studies which seem to show people acting rather well. The situationist is keen to
argue that the data I have been discussing so far should not be taken to show
that people are bad. It would be wrong, the situationist tells us, to think that
people happily electrocute innocent others, stand idly by whilst they have
seizures, or routinely refuse easily offered help, without also acknowledging the
good behaviour that can also be experimentally observed. Indeed, it is this
finding – that people seem capable of both highly praiseworthy and highly
blameworthy behaviour – that should be the take home message of the empirical
data set, according to the situationist. Behaviour is evaluatively inconsistent –
people can act very well and very poorly, their behaviour does not seem to fit
under a simple classification of good or bad. What best explains this behavioural
inconsistency is a central question that structures the debate between
situationists and character theorists. The situationist takes this finding to
undermine the idea that we have robust and consistent traits of character. For
them, the best explanation of behavioural inconsistency involves playing up the
causal importance of situational settings, and seriously downplaying the
importance of character traits in causing behaviour. A key claim of the
situationist is that situational factors swamp dispositional factors in their
influence on behaviour (Alfano 2013, 3). I will have more to say on this in the
following section.
I have just mentioned that situationists claim some experiments show people
acting in ways that are highly praiseworthy. One such author is Peter Vranas
(2005), who discusses two such findings in support of his claim that people act
‘admirably’, which we can call Thief and Technician.
Thief
In a pair of experiments Thomas Moriarty (1975) had confederates simulate a theft,
to discover what effect making a commitment to watch the belongings in question
would have on the behaviour of subjects. In the first scenario a confederate left
their radio unattended on the beach. The confederate approached the subject and
either said “Excuse me, I’m going up to the boardwalk for a few minutes ... would
you watch my things?” or “Excuse me, I’m here alone and have no matches ...
21
Situationism
do you have a light?” (372). The confederate then walked away and remained
out of sight. A few minutes later a different confederate came past, picked up
the still playing radio, and walked quickly away in the opposite direction to the
first confederate. Of the 40 subjects who noticed the theft, 19 out of 20 who had
made the commitment to “watch the things” pursued and stopped the thief, but
only 4 out of 20 who did not make the commitment did so. The second scenario
was an ‘Automat cafeteria’ in midtown Manhattan. This venue was chosen to
test the effect of making a commitment on a different group of people, “employed
individuals of lower socioeconomic status” (374). It was felt that those who were
relaxing on the beach during midweek have fewer distractions, whereas busy city
workers trying to get a quick lunch might be far less attentive to other people’s
belongings. Once again the confederate asked the subject either to keep an eye on
their suitcase, or if they had a light for their cigarette. They then left the table
and another confederate took the bag and walked away. In this case, all 8 subjects
who agreed to watch the bag stopped the thief whereas only 1 of 8 subjects who
had not made the commitment did so.
Interestingly, this is not the only experiment which involved theft. Latané
and Darley report on two experiments (1970, 70-77) in which subjects were
witness to a theft and had the opportunity to report it either spontaneously or
after being given a conversational prompt. Whilst between half and two thirds of
subjects on their own did report the theft in the two cases, that number went
down to between one quarter and half when subjects were in groups. I report
these findings to show that it is not theft as such which prompts such high levels
of helping. Rather, the direct request for assistance seems to be making the
difference.
Technician
Russell Clark and Larry Word (1974) investigated the importance of the ambiguity
of the need for help on levels of helping. They noticed that among classic bystander
effect studies there were quite high levels of non-helping even among those subjects
on their own, e.g. 30% in Latané and Rodin’s (1969) ‘lady in distress’ study. Whilst
various factors were already shown to have an effect on helping, Clark and Word
wanted to see whether helping would go up in cases where the need was highly
unambiguous. This was achieved by having subjects, on their way back from
completing a task, pass by an open door to a room in which they could clearly
see a technician working on some electrical equipment. The ‘emergency’ began
when the subject had an unmistakable view of the technician. This consisted in a
flash of light and a dull buzzing sound that emanated from the equipment. At the
same time the technician would stiffen his body, give a sharp cry of pain, upset
the apparatus around him and then collapse in a prone position (Clark and Word,
281). In one condition the technician fell in such a way that he was still in physical
contact with a number of wires, which represented a danger to anyone trying to
help. In a second condition the technician fell away from the wires and equipment
such that no such physical danger was apparent. The experimenters also ran two
variations which made the emergency more ambiguous. In one case – moderate
22
The Evidence
ambiguity – the technician was out of sight. The sound and light cues were the
same, and there was still a cry of pain, but the subjects could not see the technician.
In another case – high ambiguity – there was no cry of pain either, so the sound of
the technician falling was the only indication someone was present. Subjects were
either alone or in pairs when they encountered the emergency. Subjects in pairs
helped 100% of the time when the situation was non-ambiguous, 75% of the time
in the moderate ambiguity set-up, and 38% in the high ambiguity case.6 Subjects
on their own helped 88%, 75%, and 13% respectively. Clark and Word take this
finding to show that the level of ambiguity in a helping situation is an important
factor in the likelihood of a bystander offering assistance.
For a philosophical situationist, like Vranas, these experiments support the idea
of behavioural fragmentation. People can perform admirable as well as deplorable
actions if the circumstances enable them. The original interest of the experimenters
was not so much in whether the action was good or bad, but to investigate the
conditions under which people would be likely to offer help. These researchers saw
in the findings of the bystander effect the importance of situational differences in
whether or not people would help someone in need. These results inspired them
to discover what would make people more helpful. It turns out that there are a
number of factors which can contribute to this. We have seen that helping can be
inhibited by the presence of inactive bystanders, although there are a number of
settings in which such groups do not much inhibit helping. For example, one study
(Darley, Lewis and Teger 1973) found that the bystander effect was mitigated when
the group in question was arranged in such a way that eye-contact was facilitated,
so the natural response to check other people’s reactions to an apparent emergency
led to group action rather than inaction. We have also seen that helping can be
increased by things like feeling guilty, temporary feelings of happiness or sorrow,
and empathetic feelings. In ‘thief’ and ‘technician’ experimenters found that the
direct request for assistance and the ambiguity of an emergency both correlate
with the level of helping elicited.
In this section, I have been discussing some findings which are representative of
the empirical work used as the grounds for the situationist challenge to character.
The situationist takes these findings to show that people’s behaviour is largely
dependent on features of the situation, rather than on robust character traits.
Moreover, they argue that some of the apparent causes of this behaviour are minor
and morally insignificant and that this result is inconsistent with the widespread
possession of robust traits of character. Much of the empirical work is in fact
measured through changes in helping behaviour, but there are some other kinds
of behaviour examined, too.7 I have not aimed to provide a complete account of
the evidence that situationists take to support their position, here, but simply a
representative example of core evidence that helps to explain their view. During
6 These numbers are from experiment 2, which improved on the running of the moderate
ambiguity cases and eliminated the separation of cases where there was danger and cases where
there was not.
7 An important strain of research has looked at behaviour which could be termed ‘honest’ or
‘dishonest’. I have not discussed that work here, as this chapter is primarily about explaining
situationism, and I do not need to cover all the evidence in detail to do that. I will, however,
return to this topic later in the dissertation.
23
Situationism
this dissertation I will refer to other experiments, and, where necessary, explain
those findings in detail. In the next section I will elucidate the situationist challenge
in a number of forms, showing how different authors take somewhat different
positions to be justified from this empirical work.
2.4
Philosophical Situationism
Now that we have a flavour of the kind of empirical evidence produced by
psychologists looking at the influence of situational forces on behaviour, we can
move to the thesis of philosophical situationism. I mentioned, in my discussion of
the roots of situationism, that a number of philosophers took these findings to
raise serious concerns with the notion of character. Because this idea of character
is used in certain ethical theories, situationists think that proponents of these
theories face a challenge of empirically adequacy. Furthermore, the idea of
character that situationists challenge is also one which can be seen in our
everyday understanding of one another. So the folk psychologist – that is, the
woman on the street – might also have some mental and linguistic pruning to do
if she wants to be accurate in her understanding of, and discussion of, other
people. So what kind of character is challenged by situationism?
Having a character trait is to have a certain kind of a property which is causally
involved with your mental states and subsequent behaviours. For situationists,
whilst traits may involve other elements they are not really traits if they do not
lead to behaviour. Harman writes:
A person with the relevant character trait has a long term stable
disposition to use the relevant skills in the relevant way. Similarly, the
virtue of benevolence may involve practical knowledge concerning how to
benefit people; but mere possession of that knowledge with no disposition
to use it to benefit people would be insufficient for possession of a
benevolent character. (1999, 317)
He also attributes this view to Aristotle:
An honest person is disposed to act honestly. A kind person is disposed to
act kindly. The relevant dispositions must involve habits and not just skills,
involving habits of desiring. (ibid.)
So it is not enough for a person to ‘feel kindly’ towards others, or to ‘value honesty’,
according to Harman, for that person to be considered kind or honest. If that
person is a kind person or an honest person, then they will also have the habit of
desiring to act in these ways, have the relevant skills to do so, and actually do so.
Having that property generates an amount of predictive power – we know
that it will contribute causally towards a certain outcome, which should make
that outcome more likely – and explanatory power – when that outcome occurs,
possession of that property is likely to be part of the causal explanation for its
occurrence. Having this kind of predictive power makes traits ‘counterfactually
robust’. That is, we can make claims like ‘if X had been in that situation, then
24
Philosophical Situationism
she would have acted kindly’. Having the property of kindness underwrites this
kind of prediction, according to the situationist.
Now, there are a number of nuances in the situationist position. Whilst there
are certain core features – one is not a situationist if one does not think some
notion of character traits is challenged, for example – the extent of the sceptical
challenge, the methodology of arriving at that scepticism, and exactly what we
should be sceptical about can vary. In what follows, I will discuss a number of
different versions of the position, citing the relevant authors along the way. I am
not, here, claiming to represent a particular author in each section – indeed the
view of a particular author may have changed over time – but rather, I intend to
map out some important positions within situationism that have received support.
I will start with the most radical position before introducing a more moderate
version which includes a role for ‘local’ character traits. I will then discuss the
idea of socially-supported traits, socially-supported trait-like behaviour, and finally
consider a revamped version of situationism, which focuses more explicitly on our
rational capacities and less on character traits as such.
2.4.1
‘No-Trait Situationism’
Situationism offers a sceptical challenge to character. However, much of the
discussion is about the idea of character traits, so it is perhaps easier to
understand the challenge as targeting the existence of such traits. The most
radical account of situationism, then, is the view that claims we should be
sceptical about the existence of character traits altogether. That is, in light of
the evidence, we have no reason to believe that people have such things as
character traits. Call this view ‘no-trait situationism’.
To understand this position we must understand the way in which the
empirical evidence is a problem for the idea of character traits. The vital first
step in this argument is the claim that possession of certain character traits
comes with relevant behavioural indicators. For example, if a person has a trait
such as kindness, then that person will at some time and in some way reveal the
trait through some sort of relevant behaviour. If a person went through life,
experienced situations in which kindness was appropriate, and yet never acted
kindly towards anyone or otherwise indicated an inclination towards kindness,
then it would be a serious stretch to attribute the trait of kindness to them.8
There are a number of questions that can be asked as to what exactly this
relation between traits and behaviour is, and we shall return to these questions
later in the dissertation, but for now it is important to simply have this claim on
the table. At the very least, having a trait can be expected to influence a
person’s behaviour.
With this in place, we can now begin to understand how behavioural data
from the experiments we have reviewed can tell us something interesting about
a person’s traits. We might expect, for example, that our kind person would
act kindly in a setting in which that was appropriate. This is especially true
8 There is a question about whether a person could – in principle – possess a trait without
ever revealing it. I will have more to say about the metaphysics of traits in chapter 5.
25
Situationism
when the opportunity to act was fairly obvious and the cost of doing so was low.
However, people are not one-dimensional in their traits. A person might be kind
yet impatient, and the opportunity to be kind may also be one in which patience is
required. In such a case the person not acting kindly can be explained by another
aspect of their character, and the behaviour is not ‘out of character’. So one-off
behavioural examples like this are not going to be very good evidence for saying
whether or not a person has a particular trait. However, if we think that a person
is kind, but see that they do not act kindly in a situation we expect them to, then
this should put mild pressure on our view of them. Moreover, if we saw that they
did not act kindly in very many of these situations we might seek to find out why
not. If there were no clear explanation which allowed for this behaviour and the
belief that they had the trait of kindness, then we would be justified in changing
our view of their character.
We might also expect that a person with such a trait will act kindly in ways
that differ from someone who does not have that trait. They may be kind more
often, or exhibit greater depths of kindness when they act, or they might give
greater vocal support for acts of kindness, and offer harsher judgments for those
who are unkind. However, it would be very surprising to find that a person with
this trait was no more kind than someone without it. So another way that the
behavioural data might be problematic for attributions of traits like these is if they
revealed that people’s behaviour did not differ one from another. At least, this
would seem to show that people have very similar traits. An alternative, however,
would be to take that finding as evidence that people do not have traits at all.
That people act in uniform ways, when we expect their behaviour to reflect their
unique characters, indicates that nobody actually has characters of this sort at all.
The radical position takes the evidence we have seen (and much more) to warrant
this latter conclusion.
One author who seems at times to endorse this view is Harman (2000, 2003). He
is moved by the concern that people very often have a mistaken view of character,
and that this mistake may be leading to serious consequences. He emphasizes
various ways in which our reliance on notions of character can lead to major
problems. In particular, he highlights the way we understand violent conflicts or
political troubles through the lens of character (1999, 329). We assume that it is
the warlord’s malice, greed, or grasping nature which is at the root of a conflict,
rather than focusing on the situational factors which might be triggering it, such
as food shortages, unequal access to services, or the political need for a distraction.
So Harman is claiming not only that in our everyday understanding of character
we are misconceiving the notion, but also that there are serious consequences that
follow from this. For this reason he makes the suggestion that we would be better
off doing away with character trait notions altogether:
I myself think it is better to abandon all thought and talk of character and
virtue. I believe that ordinary thinking in terms of character traits has
disastrous effects on people’s understanding of each other, on their
understandings of what social programs are reasonable to support, and of
their understandings of international affairs. I think we need to get people
to stop doing this. We need to convince people to look at situational
26
Philosophical Situationism
factors and to stop trying to explain things in terms of character traits.
We need to abandon all talk of virtue and character, not find a way to
save it by reinterpreting it. (2000, 224)
In other words, he is an eliminativist about character trait talk.
Harman’s view relies on the idea that traits differ between persons, that
people’s different characters help to explain their different behaviours. He writes,
“In ordinary conceptions of character traits and virtues, people differ in their
possession of such traits and virtues” (1999, 317). At times it seems that for him
the question of whether people have character traits collapses to the question of
whether people differ in character traits (e.g. 2000, 223). This idea is
particularly emphasised in Harman’s brand of situationism, but as we shall see,
is not similarly held by other situationists (e.g. Doris 2002, 19).
Harman also makes clear that situationism challenges virtue ethics, but he
is careful to point out that there are many varieties of virtue ethics, and only
certain types are challenged by situationism. For example, a virtue ethics which
emphasised the idea of virtue as an ideal to guide our moral actions, but did not
claim that such an ideal could ever be reached, would not be challenged by the
situationist claim that nothing like a virtue is found when we look at real people’s
behaviour. On the no-trait view, any ethical theories – not just virtue ethical
theories – that rely on the idea that people routinely have character traits, faces
a challenge of empirical adequacy. If this is simply the wrong view of what people
are like, then, some situationists argue, the theory should be adapted accordingly.
2.4.2
‘Local-Trait Situationism’
An alternative view to the radical account is one which allows for the existence of
certain kinds of character traits. On this account the empirical evidence warrants
scepticism about the existence of global character traits, but is compatible with
the existence of local traits. A local trait is one for which the conditions of
manifestation must be specified to quite a degree, for example ‘lunchtime at work
chattiness’, or ‘under fire with comrades bravery’ (see Doris 2002, 25). Call this
view ‘local-trait situationism’.
This view is defended by Doris (1998, 2002), and is perhaps the most widely
discussed version of situationism. Doris defines ‘globalism’ as a combination of the
following three theses:
(1) Consistency. Character and personality traits are reliably manifested
in trait-relevant eliciting conditions that may vary widely in their
conduciveness to the manifestation of the trait in question.
(2) Stability. Character and personality traits are reliably manifested in
trait-relevant behaviors over iterated trials of similar trait-relevant eliciting
conditions.
(3) Evaluative integration.
In a given character or personality the
occurrence of a trait with a particular evaluative valence is
probabilistically related to the occurrence of other traits with similar
evaluative valences. (2002, 22)
27
Situationism
He takes situationism to be a qualified rejection of globalism.
according to Doris has three central commitments of its own:
Situationism,
(1) Behavioral variation across a population owes more to situational
differences than to dispositional differences among persons. Individual
dispositional differences are not so behaviorally individuating as might
have been supposed; to a surprising extent it is safest to predict, for a
particular situation, that a person will behave in a fashion similar to the
population norm.
(2) Systematic observation problematizes the attribution of robust traits.
People will quite typically behave inconsistently with respect to the
attributive standards associated with a trait, and whatever behavioral
consistency is displayed may be readily disrupted by situational variation.
This is not to deny the existence of stability; the situationist acknowledges
that individuals may exhibit behavioral regularity over iterated trials of
substantially similar situations.
(3) Personality is not often evaluatively integrated. For a given person, the
dispositions operative in one situation may have an evaluative status very
different from those manifested in another situation; evaluatively
inconsistent dispositions may ‘cohabitate’ in a single personality. (2002,
24-25)
The reason Doris takes situationism to be only a ‘qualified’ rejection of globalism
is that the second globalist thesis – stability – receives empirical support, as can
be seen in the second situationist thesis. On this basis he argues for the empirical
viability of local traits. The behavioural evidence that supports situationism is
consistent with many people possessing these sorts of traits of character. For
example, a key early experiment (Hartshorne and May 1928) found that children
who were given the opportunity to cheat, steal and lie in a number of different ways
did not reveal the kind of behavioural consistency that would justify calling them
either ‘honest’ or ‘dishonest’. That is, a particular child cheating in one setting
had only a very low correlation with their cheating in other settings. If one thought
that there was such a thing as a dishonest child, for example, one might expect
that child to cheat more often than their peers in many of these cases. However,
no such strong correlations were found. On the other hand, cheating in one fairly
specified setting – such as on an ‘answer key exam’, was a quite strong predictor
of cheating in a similar setting. This evidence, for Doris, is compatible with the
existence of a local trait such as ‘answer key exam dishonest’. This means that a
person with such a trait can be expected to reliably cheat in such a situation, but
not necessarily in others. We can see that such a trait has the property of stability
but not of consistency.9
On the basis of this claim that local traits exist, Doris develops the
9 Strictly speaking a local trait could be taken to have the property of consistency. If one
defines the trait-relevant eliciting conditions in terms of the local trait, then the local trait
manifests reliably, it simply has a very narrow range of eliciting conditions. (My thanks to Pauline
Kleingeld for highlighting this point) Whilst his wording is vague, I take Doris to understand the
eliciting conditions in terms of a global trait, such that a local trait does not have the property
of consistency.
28
Philosophical Situationism
fragmentation theory. According to this theory, people have a large number of
these local traits which play a role in their behaviour, but there is no reason to
think that people have more global traits, and we have no evidence that these
local traits are evaluatively consistent. That is, we have no reason to believe that
if a person has many local kindness-related traits this person will have few local
cruelty-related traits.
I claimed at the start of this section that, according to the situationist,
having a trait underwrites counterfactual predictions of behaviour. Now, this is
true of both global and local traits. They are both taken to have predictive and
explanatory power and to be counterfactually robust. Local traits, of course, are
only counterfactually robust over the situations specified, whereas global traits
are supposed to be robust over the full range of situations where a trait such as
kindness would be applicable. The important difference, then, is this range of
applicable situations. It is this property – cross-situational consistency – that
global traits are supposed to have but local traits are not. It is this property that
Doris takes the empirical record to challenge. To the extent that people have a
trait like kindness, he thinks, it is not stable across situations. Or, to put it
another way, having a trait like kindness seems to lose its predictive power when
we consider it across the full range of situations. Doris tells us that the more
fine-grained you specify the realising conditions of a trait – the more local it is –
the greater the predictive power. So discovering that someone is ‘answer key
exam dishonest’ will allow you to make somewhat reliable predictions about that
person’s behaviour in such situations. It might be that if the trait is further
specified to ‘answer key exam dishonest when in a group’ it is an even better
predictor of behaviour. On the other hand, as we have seen, if it becomes the
more general ‘exam dishonest’, the reliability of our predictions will decrease.
Now, local traits are supposed to also have explanatory power, so the claim
is not just that there is a strong correlation between behaviours of this sort, but
that the person has a property described by the trait. This property is causally
involved in the behaviour, and thus offers a partial explanation of it.
This view is not unanimous in the situationist camp. As we have seen, some
situationists are sceptical about traits in general, and Harman seems to be
unconvinced by the idea that local traits exist.
He suggests that such
behavioural regularity can be explained using other, non-trait, features of
psychology, such as stable goals or strategies. Consider, for example, the local
traits of ‘lunchtime at work chattiness’. Whilst Doris might claim that this
regular behaviour is evidence of such a trait, Harman argues that it can also be
explained by positing a kind of social strategy grounded in the desire to have
good workplace relations. A worker with this strategy might see lunchtime as the
best opportunity to socialise with colleagues, and thus consistently display
chattiness in this setting. For Harman, such a strategy can explain the behaviour
without having to posit a local trait. Moreover, he suggests that this picture of
local traits is not one which people have in mind when they think of character
traits (1999, 326). Here we can see evidence of the different points of enquiry
that Harman and Doris begin from. Harman is concerned with the idea that
people are making a general mistake in their belief in character, and thus finds
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Situationism
the view of character that the folk psychologist has to be the relevant starting
point. Doris is more interested in identifying whether there are any kinds of
character traits that have a claim to empirical adequacy. From this beginning he
identifies local traits as just such a case.
Whilst the case of local traits splits the situationist community, there is a
shared conclusion that global traits lack empirical support. I have mentioned in
this section that Doris takes traits’ predictive power to increase the more local
they become. This entails that the more global a trait is, the lower its predictive
power. So a general situationist conclusion – which we could say is a core belief
of the view – is that global traits lack empirical support. However, there is not
a clear cut-off point on the global-local scale marking when traits are empirically
viable.
2.4.3
‘Socially-Supported Traits’
So far I have been discussing the distinction between local and global traits,
where the more radical ‘no-trait situationism’ is sceptical about both forms, and
the more moderate ‘local-trait situationism’ allows that local traits receive
empirical support. Another way in which the strength of traits can be challenged
by the data is by focusing on the motivational force internal to those traits. This
focus on internal motivational force is simply one way of describing what it
would mean for a trait to be robust enough to play a reliable causal role across
many situations. Consider the global trait of courage. I have already described
how possession of that property would ground certain kinds of predictions and
explanations. This is because the trait is playing an important role in causing
the relevant (courageous) behaviour. The idea can be brought out by returning
to the idea of such traits having counterfactual weight. A person may never face
a challenge requiring courage, but we can say of the courageous person that were
they to be in such a situation, then their trait of courage would play a role in the
way they act. We also want to say that if a person’s courageous acts would still
occur even if they lacked the trait of courage, then this trait is not playing an
important causal role, and can be discarded from our explanation. If it turns out
that such a trait is always superfluous to the explanation of the behaviour then
we have less and less reason to claim it exists. In terms of the causal explanation
it is an unnecessary add-on.
Now, in challenging the empirical adequacy of global traits the situationist
can put pressure on this counterfactual claim. They might allow that many
people are courageous on occasion, even that some people display frequent or
reliable courageous behaviour (or perhaps some other trait-relevant behaviour if
frequent courage seems too unlikely). However, the situationist might argue that
this behaviour is the product of external features of the situation which are
conducive to this behaviour. Remove these features and the behaviour will
disappear. In other words, the trait of courage, in so far as anyone has it, is not
strong enough to generate the relevant behaviour without certain kinds of social
or situational support. Maria Merritt (2000, 2009) develops a position along
these lines. She makes the claim that traits of this sort – socially-supported
30
Philosophical Situationism
traits – are commonplace in the population. However, she argues, the picture of
virtues that can be found in the work of Aristotle is of traits which are reliable
independent of situational support. Hence she writes:
Aristotle requires that genuine virtues be firmly secured in one’s own
individual constitution, in such a way that one’s reliability in making good
practical choices depends as little as possible on contingent external
factors. (2000, 375)
Consider, for example, the prisoner of war who holds his nerve during his
imprisonment, who endures mistreatment and psychological pressure, and who
does not make confessions under duress or give up vital information. This person
might rightly be said to have the virtue of courage (or perhaps resilience or
something similar). In these unfamiliar surroundings, without the support of
allies, friends, normal avenues for complaint and protection, he still demonstrates
virtuous behaviour. This sort of trait, Merritt says, is one which has motivational
self-sufficiency (2000, 365). Now, Merritt takes the empirical record to challenge
the widespread possession of these kinds of traits, but she allows that it is
compatible with the widespread possession of traits which are socially-supported.
That is, many people are friendly and chatty in everyday life; many others are
grumpy and terse every day. However, the former group might have good
relations with the people they see everyday and the latter might have a long
commute in hot and stressful conditions. If those people found themselves in the
other setting, then their behaviour might shift. Thus, whilst we can go as far as
attributing a socially-supported trait of friendliness to the first group and of
grumpiness to the second, we are not justified in thinking such traits have
motivational self-sufficiency. This is not to say that everyone who happens to like
the people they see everyday is friendly and everyone who has a difficult
commute is grumpy. There are personal differences, which is why these people
can still be thought of as having socially-supported traits. For Merritt, the
challenge of situationism is felt most strongly by theories which are committed to
the idea of virtues, or traits more generally, that are motivationally self-sufficient.
In particular, she thinks that Aristotelian virtue ethics has this commitment,
whereas a Humean account of the virtues does not demand that they have this
property. Thus, she recommends that those interested in theorising about virtue
shift to more Humean versions if they want to accommodate the findings of
situationism (2000, 380).
2.4.4
‘Socially-Supported Trait-Like Behaviour’
So far I have discussed situationism with regard to the notion of character traits.
One can take the view to warrant scepticism about traits altogether, or
scepticism about global traits, where that focus might be on cross-situational
stability or on the idea that traits should be motivationally independent from
social or situational support. There are other differences within the situationist
camp; namely, differences regarding the use of character trait attributions and
trait language more generally. In section 4.1, I discussed the view, defended by
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Situationism
Harman, that situationism should lead us to eliminate character trait discourse
altogether. An alternative view holds that ontological scepticism about global
traits (or traits in general) need not lead us to eliminativism. The question of
what we should do with our trait terms is separate from the question of whether
or not people have such traits. If we assume for a moment that people do not
have global traits (or traits in general) what should we change about the way we
talk about character? Harman offers a number of reasons why we should do away
with character trait talk, around the general theme that employing this kind of
misleading language leads to a number of subsequent harms. However, even if
that were so, these harms would need to outweigh the costs of eliminating the
use of trait terms from our discourse and any benefits that such use brings. This
side of the equation is not much addressed by Harman. One author who does
address it is Mark Alfano (2013). He offers evidence in support of the view that
trait attributions, in just the right circumstances, can bring about trait-like
behaviour. So calling someone generous, in the right circumstances, might bring
about generous behaviour. Using trait attributions to encourage desirable
behaviour suggests that trait language might be a useful part of our social
discourse after all. How exactly does this work?
Alfano looks at the literature on the effect of ‘labelling’, which seems to show
that attributing a label in the right circumstances affects people’s behaviour. For
example, one oft-mentioned study (Miller, Brickman and Bolen 1975) compared
the effects of exhorting a group of children to keep their classroom tidy with
(falsely) congratulating a different group for their above-average tidiness. The
researchers found that whilst exhortation had a short term impact, the children
quickly returned to their untidy behaviour, but those children who were labelled
as tidy exhibited higher levels of tidiness over an extended period of time (2013,
89). Alfano points out that this kind of labelling has a similar relation to the truth
as a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the point of utterance it is not reporting a true
state of affairs, but the act of utterance, in the right circumstances, will establish
its truth. As a comparison, Alfano describes how the Chairman of the Federal
Reserve could announce that a stock market crash will occur the following day.
Whilst there may be no reason to think that this will happen before saying so, his
act of saying so will ensure its truth, as investors will act accordingly which itself
will cause the crash (2013, 86). It is important to note that the announcement
must be done in a certain way to have this effect. It must be believed for investors
to act accordingly, so if the Chairman made this claim as part of a stand-up routine
it would not take the form of this self-fulfilling prophecy. Likewise, Alfano tells us,
this kind of ‘factitious attribution’ of traits must also be believable for the person
to act accordingly. Moreover, the attribution must also be in public to an audience
that has a correct conception of what is entailed by the virtue in question:
Tacitly thinking of someone as courageous will have no effect on her conduct.
But calling her courageous in front of a crowd could put into her the very
mettle being attributed. [... But] if you call someone honest, he will only
begin to conduct himself honestly if he understands what honesty entails.
(2013, 92-93)
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Philosophical Situationism
It is important for the person to hear the attribution and to believe it plausible
and for there to be an audience who will then form a certain conception of that
person as having that trait (which gives the person a standard to live up to, and
people in whose eyes they would be failing if they did not). It is, therefore, also
important that both the person and the audience have a correct conception of
what the trait entails in order for correct trait-like behaviour to be the product.
This is, of course, a simplified account of Alfano’s picture of factitious
attributions, but it will suffice for what I want to say here. The important point
is that under certain conditions it will be beneficial to use the language of
character traits, and thus, for a situationist of this persuasion, it would be unwise
to seek to eliminate these terms from our use altogether. Alfano’s discussion of
situationism is an interesting development because it focuses much more on the
epistemological questions related to character traits. It is important to be clear
that one part of the situationist view is an ontological claim, about whether or
not character traits of this sort exist. It is a separate question, albeit one which
is intimately connected, what we can know about character traits, whether other
people’s or our own. Alfano’s factitious attributions relate to this topic as the
trait-relevant behaviour we might hope to elicit relies on what we believe about
our own and other people’s traits. He also forays into epistemological questions
when he gives a detailed account of numerous heuristics and biases which are
common to folk psychology, arguing that the combination of these effects would
lead us to believe in the existence of character traits even if they do not in fact
exist (2011).10
2.4.5
Situationism Updated:
Cognition
Internal Aspects of Moral
So far I have outlined a number of positions within situationism and mentioned
some authors who have defended positions of these kinds. Needless to say, these
arguments have not been left unanswered. Many philosophers have raised
objections against situationism, either directly in defence of virtue ethics or
simply by way of showing flaws in the situationist’s arguments. I will discuss
some of these counter-arguments in the chapters to follow. Here I want to briefly
introduce what might be thought of as an updated view of situationism offered
by Merritt, Doris, and Harman in a chapter of ‘The Moral Psychology
Handbook’ (Doris 2010). The view is updated because it aims, in part, to
respond to some of the criticisms which had been set against situationism at that
point. I will engage with this work more fully in chapter 5.
In their own words, this incarnation of the situationist challenge seeks to
determine “in what circumstances human cognition deserves the philosophical
honorific ‘practical rationality”’(2010, 392). This version of their argument,
10 He also argues that the structure of situationist arguments against virtues and vices in the
moral domain can also be applied to virtues and vices in the domain of epistemology (2012). In
this way he builds an argument against virtue epistemology. I will not say more about this topic
here, but this expansion of the situationist challenge to areas outside the moral domain opens
up interesting possibilities for future research.
33
Situationism
whilst a continuation of the situationist arguments I have already outlined, is
marked by a focus on the internal aspects of cognition, and the way in which
situational cues influence these cognitive processes. The authors take this picture
of human cognition to cast doubt on whether people typically have the faculty of
practical rationality as it is understood in virtue ethical (and other) theories. In
my view, this work represents an attempt to fill in the details behind the original
situationist arguments about the unreliable connection between apparent
character traits and behaviour.
It shifts emphasis from the behavioural
arguments described in this chapter to a focus on the internal world of moral
cognition. However, discussion of this internal aspect of traits was already a part
of earlier situationist argument (for example, Doris 2002, 17), and Merritt et al.
clearly rely on the behavioural evidence as well, which suggests they still take
this to be a central weapon in the situationist arsenal. Consequently, this work
should be thought of as a development of the core situationist argument, rather
than a radical change.
The shift in emphasis puts the focus on the internal world, on the role of
rationality, values, and perception in action. The authors point to experimental
results showing that people’s choices can be affected by the way a question is
framed (Tversky and Kahneman 1981). They cite evidence showing that
‘priming’ people with words related to groups – ‘we’ and ‘our’ – or words related
to individuals – ‘I’ and ‘my’ – has an effect on what sort of values they report as
being ‘guiding principles in their lives’. They also point to the suggestion by
John Darley and Daniel Batson (1973, 107-108) that certain situational factors
may affect people’s perception of a situation (at least the normative features of
it). The authors argue that these findings show the malleability of people’s
values, and of the way they perceive and reason about the world around them.
In light of this, they claim, the picture of practical reasoning that is in play in
much ethical theory is problematic (2010, 362). In particular, the authors
highlight two issues which they see as a serious challenge to the traditional
picture of people engaging in practical reasoning. First, they point to the fact
that people seem to endorse certain moral standards yet they routinely act in
ways that are contrary to those standards (363-367).
They label this
phenomenon ‘moral dissociation’. Second, they note that people’s attention to
their environments seems to vary a great deal, and this fact sits uncomfortably
with the idea that good moral agents are reliably sensitive to the moral facts of
the world around them (381-385). In other words, if our attention is easily
caught by certain features of our surroundings – and perhaps in ways which are
not immediately obvious to us – it seems wrong to think that we can reliably be
aware of those moral features of our surroundings which place demands on us as
moral agents. To give a brief example, we might miss the fact that a homeless
person is having medical difficulties nearby and needs our help because the
smells, sounds, and lights of the restaurant in front of us are so attention
grabbing, or just because we are in deep conversation with a friend. The authors
argue that the current picture of human cognition indicates that much of the way
that we perceive, evaluate, reason about, and interact with the world around us
relies on subconscious processes which are not amenable to our rational control.
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Philosophical Situationism
To give one example, many people have subconscious biases against certain races
or other social groups, often embodying socially reinforced stereotypes
(Greenwald and Banaji 1995). Whilst these biases need not be endorsed by the
person in question – indeed they usually are not – they can influence the way we
perceive people (judging them to be more or less threatening, for example), and
as a result the way we reason about how to interact with them. Whilst we may
be quite committed to the idea that race is not a morally relevant factor (or even
a distinction which captures a class at all) these biases still influence the way we
perceive, think and act. This, and other such findings, are what Merritt et al.
take to explain the phenomenon of moral dissociation. We are simply not in
complete conscious control of these aspects of cognition.
In a separate piece, Alfano (2013, 40) argues for a related point. He notes
that the most disconcerting aspect of the situationist challenge is the idea that
we are routinely influenced by “situational non-reasons”. These are factors which
influence our behaviour in ways that are not clearly rational. In contrast, people
sometimes act in ways which they would not endorse, but which are perfectly
rational. Consider the finding that many people will take the opportunity to cheat
(a little bit) when they can get away with it (see Ariely 2008, chapter 11 for some
useful examples). These people may well think such behaviour is not appropriate,
but the opportunity to make some extra money tempts them into doing so. Such
temptations might be morally troublesome for us, but they are not so much a
challenge to character. The idea of temptation and of good people succumbing to
it has always been a part of the picture of moral character. Rather, it is those new
and interesting findings that show people’s behaviour to be influenced by factors
where there appears to be no rational explanation that are more worrying. We
can think here particularly of those factors which are recorded in the mood effect –
smells, light levels, temperature, etc. Behaviour being influenced by these factors
seems to undermine the picture of people as fully rational agents in control of their
behaviour. This aspect of situationism has come to the fore in recent work on the
subject.
2.4.6
Normative Conclusions of Situationism
Proponents of situationism differ not only in terms of the type of character they
take to be challenged and the methodology they follow in justifying that
challenge. They also differ in the prescriptive conclusions they take to be
warranted by these arguments. Harman’s eliminativism about character comes
from his more radical version of character scepticism. He thinks that we ought to
stop thinking in character terms and that doing so will have serious benefits in
terms of our understanding of political strife, as well as our understanding of one
another. Once we see the flaws in characterological thinking we should be more
tolerant of one another, in part because we can see the influence of moral luck in
other people’s actions. Sometimes people find themselves in morally dangerous
situations and we should be slow to blame them for their actions (or at least to
attribute those actions to their characters).
Doris also discusses some prescriptive conclusions that we can take from the
35
Situationism
situationist argument. Like Harman, and unsurprisingly, he suggests that we
should pay much closer attention to the role of situational forces in our actions.
However, rather than focusing on the way our moral judgments should change in
the light of situationism, he suggests that we can actually improve our moral
behaviours with this information. We should, he tells us, avoid morally
dangerous situations rather than trusting that we are strong willed enough to
cope with those dangers. If we have a project to finish this evening it would be
unwise to join friends at the pub after work for ‘one drink’, trusting that we will
stick to this limit and get our work done. For sure, we might be able to, but the
lure of temptations is much greater when they are in our immediate vicinity.
Better, he says, to manage our situations in such a way that we avoid
temptation (2002, 146-149).
As we have seen, Merritt thinks that a Humean account of virtues survives
the empirical concerns raised by situationism. In general, situationists make clear
that some versions of virtue ethics might not face the challenge, but note that
other ethical theories may also need to meet this empirical burden of proof.
These conclusions are not prescriptions for moral agents in general, but for
ethical theorists.
Merritt also argues that the character traits we have rely on reinforcement
from other people. This does not necessarily mean that other people have to be
present at the moment of action, but that our dispositional motivations to act rely
on a general reinforcement from particular individuals with whom we share values
(2009, 36). However, she thinks that these interpersonal processes reinforcing
behaviour can sometimes be detrimental. She points out that in experimental
conditions, subjects will often decide to act in ways that they believe the audience
finds acceptable, thus bypassing the need to independently evaluate the situation
(43). We can imagine how easily this leads to immoral behaviour under morally
dangerous circumstances, such as in a warzone. Merritt points out that when the
preferences of the audience are not known, subjects are forced to deliberate about
the right thing to do. Thus, she recommends making people aware that they
will be held accountable but without indicating the preferences of the audience
(43). More generally, Merritt thinks that we should utilise the finding that our
judgments and decision-making are highly reliant on interpersonal evaluations to
enable people to make better moral decisions.
Finally, Alfano has developed an argument for a different way that we can
improve moral behaviour, one that does not simply focus on situation
management. He argues that virtue-like behaviour can be inculcated by the
‘factitious’ attribution of virtues. When this is done in the right way and at the
opportune moment, he argues, we have reason to believe people will act in line
with this attribution, even if they do not really have the virtue in question.
So there is a range of normative and prescriptive conclusions that situationists
draw from their argument. Moreover, the conclusions one arrives at will depend,
to some extent, on the version of situationism that one finds most persuasive. I
will not be taking direct issue with any of these prescriptions, indeed some of
them may constitute wise advice. Rather, I will develop challenges against the
core situationist argument. In the final chapter I will return to the topic of ways
36
Conclusion
we might hope to improve ourselves and our behaviour, in light of the arguments
I have made.
2.5
Conclusion
The aim of this chapter has been to familiarise the reader with situationism. I have
given a brief background to the position, before spending the bulk of the chapter
describing important segments of the evidence used to justify their arguments.
Finally I clarified a variety of positions within the view specific to different authors.
I have not yet critically engaged with the evidence or these arguments.
In the next chapter, I will survey how the main targets of situationism – virtue
ethics and trait psychology – have responded to this challenge. My aim is not
to defend either of these positions, but to outline the core set of responses from
these fields. I will argue that despite there being a range of interesting replies to
situationism, which have helped to clarify the challenge and what is at stake, the
situationist challenge remains unmet. Then, in chapters 4 and 5 I will develop my
own line of response to situationism.
37