University of Groningen

Vice VersaBates, Thomas Edward

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Chapter 2Situationism

2.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I will show, in detail, how situationists see the empirical record asgrounding a serious challenge to the idea of character and character traits that theytake to be widely in use. In describing this challenge I will make clear exactly whatthe central claims of situationism are, exactly how these contradict or underminethe notions of character they challenge and how the data are taken to supportthe situationist’s critique of character. Whilst I will at times refer to situationismas a single position – in philosophy – and to ‘the situationist’ as a proponent ofthat position, there are a number of authors who have taken up that stance andeach has a somewhat different focus on the data, and how it challenges notions ofcharacter. I will clarify the differences between these views. This is not to denythat there are core themes to the view which all situationists buy in to, such thatif one does not hold that belief one is not a situationist. I will also make thesethemes explicit.

Philosophical situationism – the position I am interested in – is firmly rootedin a paradigm of psychology, which is sometimes called situationalism. I willendeavour to be clear when discussing authors who are in the psychologicaltradition, but when I say ‘the situationist’ I am talking about a proponent ofphilosophical situationism.

There has already been a heated back-and-forth between situationists and thosewho oppose the position (see Merritt, Doris, and Harman 2010; Alfano 2013; Miller2014 for useful overviews). This has produced refinements on both sides of thedebate. In this chapter I will only be focusing on the situationist position, not onthose who criticise the view.

In section 2, I will give a detailed account of where philosophical situationismcame from. In section 3, I review important parts of the empirical basis ofsituationism. In section 4, I will distinguish the different positions that aredefended by situationists.

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Situationism

2.2 The Roots of Situationism

Philosophical situationism arose from the tension growing between an empiricaltrend in moral psychology and a resurgence in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics inmoral theory. Sparked by Elizabeth Anscombe’s biting critique of “modern moralphilosophy” (1958), a growing research program in virtue ethics had beenenjoying a renaissance in the latter half of the 20th century (for example, Foot1978; McDowell 1979; MacIntyre 1984; Williams 1985). This return to some ofthe ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers, in particular to the idea of virtue asa central moral concept, was driven by the claim that the concepts currently inplay in moral philosophy, concepts like ‘the good’ and ‘the right’, suffered fromthe fact that they are purely evaluative in nature. In part, then, Anscombe’sappeal was for moral philosophers to bring back more descriptively ‘thick’ ethicalconcepts, which would tie ethical theory more closely to the world of moraldecision-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 ofthe action in virtue of which it has that valence. In terms of moral guidance – acentral goal of ethical theories – one does much better to instruct an agent to acthonestly, then simply to act well, or do the right thing. To be sure, it does notpoint out the specific honest action one should perform, but we are all – it mightbe thought – au fait with common examples of honesty relating to our particularexperience of the world, which could guide us in facing the particular challengeswe come across. This thought, alongside the specific and dramatic claim that, “itis not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laidaside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology”(Anscombe 1958, 1) led proponents of the resurgent virtue ethics to claim forthemselves the advantage of having a more adequate moral psychology than itstheoretical competitors, namely consequentialism and deontology.

On the other hand, within psychology a heated debate between personalitypsychologists and social psychologists was addressing precisely the sort ofempirical data which might be of interest to ethical theorists concerned withhaving an adequate philosophy of psychology. The debate focused on theexistence of personality traits in humans and the question of whether and towhat extent such traits play a causal role in behaviour (see Mischel 1968 for akey early text; see Funder 2001 for a retrospective overview of this debate fromthe perspective of personality psychology). This empirical challenge topersonality traits represented the original version of situationism, as it was foundin psychology. This position forms the basis of philosophical situationism, asboth positions argue that on the basis of behavioural evidence we should focuson 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 toaddress these morally loaded notions. Whilst the personality-situation debatestill exists today, in a modified form, and some of the original voices in thatdebate (e.g., Walter Mischel) have since decried the strict dichotomy betweensituationism (in psychology) and dispositionalism – the view that personal

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The Roots of Situationism

dispositions, or traits, play a significant role in behaviour – it would not becontroversial 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 thefoundation of philosophical situationism at the turn of the century, in work byOwen Flanagan (1991), John Doris (1998, 2002), and Gilbert Harman (1999,2000, 2001, 2009). This line of research was then taken up by other writers suchas Maria Merritt (2000, 2009), Peter Vranas (2005, 2009), and Mark Alfano(2013). These authors were convinced by the claim that behaviour was to a greatextent the product of situational factors rather than flowing from personaldispositions. This finding, they would go on to claim, is seriously problematic forethical theories that place notions of character as central to discussions of ethicalevaluation, action guidance, and moral judgment. Thus the dialectic is set up,with philosophical situationism offering a challenge directly to the rejuvenatedfield of virtue ethics. The force of their attack is especially stinging as it is, so tospeak, on the virtue ethicists’ home turf; the challenge is one of empiricalinadequacy, attacking precisely the advantage that these theorists had claimedfor themselves over their theoretical competitors.

Given this genealogy we can easily understand situationism as a challenge tovirtue 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 particularfor an empirically adequate account. This challenge is not specific to virtue ethics.Any empirical claims or assumptions in an ethical theory must meet a burdenof empirical adequacy. If that burden cannot be met, this will count against thetheory, just as much as if it suffers from internal tensions, or intuitive implausibility(Timmons 2002, 271). In the particular case of situationism, then, any theorywhich relies on empirically inadequate notions of character has some work to do.They can revise their theory, they can challenge situationism, or they can revisetheir claim to empirical adequacy.

Situationism should not only be understood as making a contribution todiscussions of ethical theory. It has a stake in the language we use about ourcharacters in the real world as well. Consider the following claims: “CaptainJones is a brave woman”; “Professor Higgins is a considerate person”; “Myparents were kind people”; “I am a coward”; “You are a really generous person”.Whatever else these statements might be doing – making people feel good aboutthemselves, for example – they also seem to be making claims about the peoplein question. These terms – brave, considerate, kind, coward, and generous – are‘thick’ in the sense noted above, they have both an evaluative dimension and adescriptive aspect. This latter part means that the claims can be incorrect, evenif 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 asmaking strong descriptive claims. It could be that the evaluative part of thestatement, or something else, is its primary function, such that the discoverythat the apparent descriptive claim is false would not lead the speaker to alterthe statement – as they did not intend to primarily make a descriptive claim in

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Situationism

the first place. For now I wish to set those thoughts aside and simply state thatthese kinds of claims made in everyday social discourse also seem to face thechallenge of situationism. If we believe, and claim, that people have certain traitsof character, then we should be interested in evidence which suggests we aremistaken. This, in turn, might lead us to radically rethink some of our socialpractices. Consider, for example, the practice of character witnesses in a court oflaw, or personal references for job applications. If we make claims about people’scharacter traits that turn out to be dubious, then we might become motivated tochange these practices accordingly.

So there are two broad targets for the situationist challenge: ethical theoriesthat employ potentially suspect notions of character, and everyday beliefs andlanguage about one another’s character. Naturally the way these two targets areaffected by the situationist critique will differ somewhat, but there is a core tosituationism that motivates both challenges. In the next section, I will discusssome 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 situationismwhilst 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 basedon the empirical record amassed by numerous psychology experiments. Thereare many findings which comprise this empirical data set, and I will not attemptto give a complete review of these findings (for relevant overviews, see Ross andNisbett 1991, Doris 2002, Miller 2013, 2014). Nonetheless, it is important for thereader to grasp the nature of these experiments and why exactly they convincesituationists to be sceptical of certain kinds of character. In this section, I willdescribe some aspects of the empirical literature in detail in order to achieve thistask. I will be selective in what I discuss, so the reader might be concerned thatI am selecting only those findings which will be useful for my own arguments. Iwill indeed refer to the evidence described below when discussing the merits ofsituationism in later chapters, but this evidence is representative of the empiricaltradition usually cited in support of situationism. Milgram’s studies, for example,are described by Doris as “powerful evidence for situationism” (2002, 39). WhilstI 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 ‘bystandereffect’, 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 – StanleyMilgram’s ‘obedience experiments’.

2.3.1 Milgram’s Obedience Experiments

During this series of meticulously planned and carefully adjusted experimentsStanley Milgram (1974) sought to investigate how ordinary people would react to

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The Evidence

authority figures issuing morally problematic instructions. He wanted to knowabout the phenomenon of obedience to authority, in light of the atrocitiescommitted by the Nazis during the holocaust. In particular, he was interested indiscovering under what conditions a subject would obey or disobey an authorityfigure. The role of obedience in binding individuals to authority structures insociety is of great importance, and Milgram notes (1974, 4) that the ethics ofobedience and disobedience has been a topic of discussion at least since Plato.However, as an empirical scientist, Milgram wanted to understand where thetipping points are when one’s individual conscience comes into conflict with theinstructions of authority. To do so he set up an experiment in which the twowould become increasingly in tension with one another, in order to identify thepoint at which the subject becomes disobedient to the authority.

Under the guise of being an experiment testing the effect of punishment onlearning, Milgram had subjects play the role of a ‘teacher’ who would beadministering electric shocks of increasing strength to a ‘learner’ – an actor, orconfederate, who was working with Milgram – each time they failed to correctlyanswer a word-pair memory question. In order to ensure the reality of theshocks, the subjects were given a 45-volt shock from the machine before theexperiment proper began. Moreover, as they gave increasingly severe shocks theywere required to read out the voltage, which served to remind them of theseverity. The victim would provide incorrect answers on a schedule of roughlythree wrong answers to one correct. This meant that the level of shocks beingadministered increased regularly and sharply. The impressive setting of YaleUniversity, the authoritative figure of the white-coated experimenter, and thelearner’s volunteering for the experiment provided little, if any, reason to disobeythe experimenter initially. However, the situation would rapidly change into onein which the subject was mediating the instructed punishment of the authorityonto a now unwilling victim, despite his screams of pain. Surprisingly, theauthority figure was able to maintain this obedience simply by a series of verbalprompts. These four prompts would be used in response to the subject askingwhether or not to continue or protesting that they would not do so. The promptswere 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 thenext. Only if a subject continued to protest after the fourth prompt would theexperiment be terminated. If the subject asked about permanent physical damageto 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 thesubject did not want to continue the response was, “Whether the learner likes it

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Situationism

or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So pleasego on” (24).

An important part of the experiments is the feedback the subject receivedfrom the learner. In the initial set-up the learner was in an isolated room, and theonly feedback received was a thumping on the wall after the 300-volt mark. Fromthe second experiment onwards this was changed to voice feedback, so that thelearner could more explicitly express his removal of consent. In the voice feedbackconditions the learner displayed increasing agitation. He first grunted at 75 volts,then, at 120 volts, he would shout that the shocks were becoming painful. At150 volts he would shout, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in theexperiment any more! I refuse to go on!” (25). Up until 300 volts his screamsbecame more severe and he continued to insist that he be let out. At that pointhe shouted that he would no longer provide answers, but, having been promptedby the authority, subjects would continue to administer shocks if no answer wasgiven. At 330 volts the subject was not heard from again and no lights appearedon the signal box to indicate the learner’s chosen answer. Subjects who continuedto be obedient were instructed to continue to the highest voltage – 450 – at whichlevel they administered two additional rounds of shocks before the experimenterterminated the test.

The set-up of the experiment placed the subject in a situation where theyfaced 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 aninnocent stranger – was unattractive, producing an avoidance tendency. The skillof Milgram’s manipulations of the experimental set-up allowed him to preciselyidentify which factors were causing behavioural changes in the subjects, in otherwords, which factors led subjects to resolve this avoidance-avoidance dilemma oneway or the other. This will become clear when we pay closer attention to hisresults.

In the initial experiment, despite the fact that most subjects objected numeroustimes, and all subjects questioned the authority figure about continuing at leastonce, 65% continued until the experiment was terminated by the experimenter.This figure turned out to be remarkably robust. Over many replications of thestandard Milgram experiment “two-thirds obedient, everywhere the experimenthas 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 thepublic – to make predictions about their own levels of obedience in the experimenthaving had the details of it explained to them. All predicted that they would bedisobedient before the 300-volt mark, and the general prediction was that only apathological fringe – 1-2% - would be fully obedient. Additionally, Milgram hada number of people observe the experiment whilst it was in progress. In that waythey were able to fully grasp the situational forces in play. Nevertheless, theyexpressed extreme surprise at the continued obedience of subjects. An interestingconclusion to come out of these experiments, then, was that we can be very poorat perceiving what forces affect our behaviour, and, in particular, the strength ofthose forces. As a result we can be seriously mistaken in our predictions of our

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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 theexperimental set-up were changed in order to identify which of these factors hadan impact on behaviour. The features he varied included more specific protestsfrom the learner (including complaints about his heart), variation in the personwho played the learner, proximity of the authority, gender of subjects, priorconditions stated by learner, the setting of the experiment, and giving thesubjects the freedom to choose the shock level. In addition to these there weretwo main sets of variants that Milgram investigated: proximity of the learner androle-permutations. As can be seen in the table below (a composite of the tablesgiven in Milgram 1974), changes in many of the variables had an impact on thesubjects’ behaviour:

ExperimentNo.

Variable Mean of themaximumshock level 1

Percentageadministeringmaximum shock 2

1. Remote 27.0 65.0%2. Voice-Feedback 24.53 62.5%3. Proximity 20.80 40.0%4. Touch-proximity 17.88 30.0%5. New Base-line 24.55 65.0%6. Change of Personnel 22.20 50.0%7. Experimenter Absent 18.15 20.5%8. Women 24.73 65.0%9. Enters with Prior Conditions 21.40 40.0%10. Office Building, Bridgport 20.95 47.5%11. Subject Chooses Shock Level 5.50 2.5%12. Learner Demands to Be Shocked 10.0 0.0%13. Ordinary Man Gives Orders 16.25 20.0%13a.3 Subject as Bystander 24.9 68.75%14. Authority as Victim 10.0 0.0%15. Two Authorities: Contradictory Commands 10.0 0.0%16. Two Authorities: One as Victim 23.5 65.0%17. Two Peers Rebel 16.45 10.0%18. Peer Administers Shocks 28.65 92.5%

I shall return to some of these results later when I consider how situationists havetaken these experiments to support their position, but for now it is worth notingsome main trends. The first is that increased proximity of the learner to thesubject decreases their willingness to continue administering shocks. The other isthat certain role permutations – such as the authority swapping places with thelearner (experiment 14) – have a dramatic impact on behaviour, whereas others –an authority figure taking the role of the learner, whilst another authority runs the

1Shock level ranges from 1 – 30. Starting at 15 volts each level increases by 15 volts up to450 volts, which is level 30.

2This column is sometimes labelled as ‘Percentage Obedient’ by Milgram. Needless to say, allwho were obedient administered the maximum shock level, but in some variants of the experimentadministering that level didn’t constitute obedience, so this label is more accurate for the dataviewed as a whole.

3Those subjects who refused to continue with the ordinary man’s instructions in experiment13 were then asked by the man to record the shock durations, as he would take over administeringthe shocks. 13a records how many of these subjects were willing to let the man continue theexperiment. 68.75% of them did not interfere with his administering the maximum shock level.

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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 personalityof 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 ofthe situationist literature because it shows how manipulations of the experimentalsetting can lead to clear variations in the subjects’ behaviour. Moreover, it showsthat people’s predictions of their own and other people’s behaviour in such asituation can be radically mistaken.

2.3.2 The Bystander Effect

Much of the experimental work looking at the effect of situational inputs onbehaviour seeks to measure the willingness of subjects to offer help when there isan apparent need. One important subset of these experiments looks at the role ofinactive bystanders in influencing the level of help offered by subjects in just suchcircumstances. 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 thatpeople’s behaviour is affected by the presence of inactive bystanders. BibbLatane and John Darley (1968) had subjects fill out a questionnaire in a smallwaiting room. Whilst they were doing this a stream of smoke was introducedinto the room via a wall vent. The experimenters measured the length of timethe subjects took before leaving the room to report the smoke. The variable theyintroduced was that in some cases the subject was alone, whilst in others therewere two confederates also filling in questionnaires. The confederates attemptedto avoid conversation as much as possible, and showed active disinterest in thesmoke.4 Of those subjects who were alone 75% reported the smoke, usually afteran investigation of the vent and the smoke more closely. Of the subjects whowere with the unresponsive bystanders only 10% (1 of the 10 subjects) reportedthe smoke. The others continued with the questionnaire as the room filled upwith smoke, often waving away the fumes, coughing, rubbing their eyes, andopening a window (218). An interesting secondary finding of the experiment isthat the median time taken for subjects to notice the smoke when alone was lessthan 5 seconds, but with the confederates was 20 seconds. The authors explainthis in terms of the constraints felt in public places – whilst alone people tend toglance around themselves quite freely, but in groups people tend to look down orfocus on something in particular, perhaps to avoid appearing rudely inquisitive(219). This shows that being in a group also lessens people’s attentiveness totheir surroundings. It should be noted that this does not account for the lowerrate of reporting; rather, it is a second and distinct effect. In post-experimentinterviews subjects who had reported the smoke generally said that they werenot sure of its origins but thought it was a good idea to check it out. Those whohad not done so reported that they had rejected the idea that it was a fire, often

4Having stared briefly at the smoke they shrugged their shoulders and continued with thequestionnaire. If engaged in conversation by the subject they responded “I dunno”. No subjectspersisted in talking to them (217).

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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 toimprove the subject’s performance on the questionnaire (Latane and Darley1970, 52)! Whilst some reported that they thought it was “some sort ofexperiment” (ibid.), which led them to simply endure the event, none reportedthat the presence of the bystanders had influenced their decision to act.

This effect has been consistently found in experimental settings with a similarset-up, where the central variable has been the presence or absence of passivebystanders. In an earlier work (Darley and Latane 1968) the same authors foundthat people’s inclination to help can be affected by the perception that thereis someone else present, even if they are not located in the same place. Underthe pretence of interviews about personal problems associated with college life,the experimenters had students participate in a discussion over an intercom (toprevent embarrassment). During the discussion one of the other subjects appearedto have a seizure, and the dependent variable was the speed with which the subjectsreported the emergency. The key variable was the number of other students thesubjects believed were involved in the discussion (378). The experimenter had –under the guise of ensuring an uninhibited discussion – removed himself from thediscussion, so the subjects did not believe that an authority figure was aware ofthe 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 microphoneswere 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 oftalking, the victim indicated with embarrassment that under stress he was proneto seizures. After a complete round of input from the single subject and the otherpre-recorded statements, the victim – also pre-recorded – spoke again. This time,after a few comments he began to speak more loudly and incoherently. Thoughstuttering, he began asking for help, then indicated that he was “having a realproblem”, asked for help again, and between choking noises claimed that “I’mgonna die”, before falling quiet (379). The subjects in the experiment were ledto 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 2responded by the end of the fit, 62% in groups of 3 did so, and 31% of subjects ingroups of 6. Moreover every subject in the 2-person group scenario reported theemergency within the 6-minute time limit, but only 62% of those in the 6-persongroup did so.

Group size also affected the speed of response. 60 seconds after the beginning ofthe 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 2-group setting had. After 120 seconds those numbers are approximately 55%, 75%and 95% respectively. Those numbers rose slightly by 160 seconds, but levelledout at that point. Whilst in a real situation the victim would likely receive helpin every case – as the number of potential reporters compensates for the lowerlikelihood of reporting in the group – it is worthy of note that their chances ofreceiving help quickly are much higher if there is only one bystander than a groupof 5 others. In cases where speed is of the essence, we might be better off with

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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 purportedbystanders had an impact on rates of helping. Those who did report the emergencyseemed concerned but not panicked, whereas those who did not report it seemedmuch more agitated when the experimenter entered the room, often immediatelyasking if “he’s all right” or asking “Is he being taken care of?” (382). The authorshypothesized that subjects had not chosen not to respond, but rather were trappedbetween two urges; the impulse to help, and the reticence to leave the experimentalsetting, invade the privacy of the victim, or make fools of themselves by over-reacting. It is interesting to note that this conflict of motivations mirrors theconflict in Milgram’s experiments. It is not clearly an avoidance-avoidance conflicthere, 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 thetask at hand, rather than leaving the experimental setting. So there are possiblemotivations on both sides which might be avoidance based, and motivations whichmight be attraction based, i.e. wanting to help, or wanting to complete the task.

The fact that personality measures were no predictor of helping behaviourundermines a common response to inactive bystanders during a tragedy: thatthey are alienated, dehumanized, or psychopathic. Situationists argue that thesefindings show that anyone can fail to act in an emergency if the situational settingis a particular way. It is not to do with personal flaws, they will argue, but havingthe right (or wrong) kind of situational support. If the findings of these sorts ofexperiments are correct, these moralizing judgments we make – to help explainhow such shocking failures can occur, and perhaps to reassure ourselves that wewould act differently – miss their mark. Rather, the presence of other people seemsto 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 experimentalevidence. The range of experiments aimed at understanding the effect and itsboundary conditions is captured in a meta-analysis by Latane and Nida (1981), inwhich they document the various tests and discuss the key explanatory featuresof the effect. Drawing on Latane and Darley’s 1970 monograph, they claim thatthere are three psychological processes – social influence, audience inhibition, anddiffusion of responsibility – that lead bystanders to be less likely to act when othersare present (309). The bystander is in the unenviable position, it is claimed, offacing two unpleasant alternatives, both of which naturally produce an avoidanceresponse. These are the act of helping in an emergency itself, which comes witha number of costs (and surely we cannot know the number or extent of the coststo us when we act), and few rewards. The other is the act of not helping, whichcomes with embarrassment, guilt, possible social condemnation, and so on.

5This particular experiment was discussed in the light of the murder of Kitty Genovese inNew York City in the 1960s. Since that time the reporting of the facts of that case has comeunder scrutiny and it seems now that the bystanders were not so horribly culpable as initiallythought. Nevertheless, the experiment itself stands as good evidence of the extent of damage theeffect can cause, given that nearly all subjects took the situation to be real and thus, so far asthey knew, their inaction risked the death of an innocent.

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The Evidence

Latane and Darley describe a number of steps necessary for someone to helpin such an emergency. They must first notice that something is happening, theninterpret 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 theaction (1970, 31-32). During the decision process any of the psychologicalmechanisms mentioned above might play a role. In a group, a person runs therisk of embarrassment if they act on a situation they have misinterpreted, thelarger the group the greater the potential embarrassment. In this way theaudience inhibits action. Moreover, the reactions of others help us to define theevent that is occurring. This social influence on our perception of the eventmakes 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 psychologicalcost of non-intervention through the diffusion of responsibility amongst thegroup. All three processes, it is claimed, are necessary to account fully for thesocial inhibition of helping (Latane and Nida, 1981, 309).

As with Milgram’s studies, the experiments that make up the bystander effectare 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 robustdampening effect on people’s inclinations to help. The situationist takes thisfinding to be important because it shows how a seemingly innocuous, andapparently morally irrelevant feature, of the situation can have a significantimpact on how people act in morally relevant ways. The difference betweenhelping someone in need or not might come down to whether one is alone or partof an inactive group. This finding is worrying for character theorists, thesituationist says, because it seems to undermine the idea that some people havethe character trait of ‘helpfulness’ and others do not. Being helpful, they claim,seems to be much more dependent on external factors than we had previouslythought.

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 situationismare those which measured the effect of manipulating mood on behaviour, primarilyhelping behaviour. One such example which is often used is the so called ‘dimeexperiment’ run by Alice Isen and Paula Levin (1972), in which the experimentersmanipulated the mood of the subjects by having one group of them find a dimein 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 helpto a confederate who ‘accidentally’ dropped her papers on the ground. Isen andLevin reported that those who had found the dime were considerably more likelyto help than those who did not. Perhaps because of the striking difference inhelping – only 1 person out of 25 who did not find the dime helped and only 2

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Situationism

people out of 16 who found the dime did not – this experiment is often cited insupport of situationism. Such a minor thing as finding a dime is surely irrelevant towhether or not we should help, and yet it appears to make a significant difference.The experiment, however, is rather controversial, in that an attempted replicationfound no significant difference between those who found the dime and those whodid not (Blevins and Murphy 1974, 326). It is therefore unfortunate that this studyis offered as representative of the mood effect. There are indeed many studies thatshow the effect of mood manipulation on behaviour, but we should not take thestrength of the effect indicated in Isen and Levin’s result to be representative.

In recent work, Christian Miller has discussed data which shows arelationship between manipulating feelings of guilt and helping behaviour (2013,29-56), feelings of empathy and helping (2013, 102-130), and a number of othersimilar relationships. In light of these findings, this section might more aptly becalled ‘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 theterminology of mood, I will follow this trend. Nonetheless, it is worth bearing inmind that the relationship between manipulations of people’s affective states andtheir behaviour seems to be wider than just mood manipulation. Indeed, thebreadth of this effect is so substantial that it is not clear that it should beclassified under just one term. Consider that both positive and negative changesin mood have an impact on behaviour; in both cases they tend to lead toincreased helping behaviour. In a helpful review of this literature, Mark Schallerand Robert Cialdini (1990) note that the positive and negative moods underdiscussion should be thought of as ‘happiness’ and ‘sorrow’. These are temporarymood states, they say, and should be distinguished from other positive moodssuch as pride, and other negative states such as anger, frustration and guilt(266). The temporary part is also important. The triggers used in theexperiments lead to a short-term feelings of happiness or sorrow, so it is not clearthat a person experiencing chronic depression, or having a ‘happy disposition’will frequently display helping behaviour. This is in line with the idea that it ischanges in these states which lead to changes in behaviour.

Now, there can be any number of situational factors which trigger thechanges in mood. Experimenters have produced positive moods with situationalmanipulations such as pleasant smells (Baron and Thomley 1994), pleasantweather (Cunningham 1979), listening to soothing music (Fried and Berkowitz1979), and being labelled a charitable person (Kraut 1973). Negative moods havebeen triggered by factors such as loud noises in the proximity (Mathews andCanon 1975) and the recall or imagining of sad events. It is clear, then, thatthere are many situational factors which can influence our behaviour via achange in our affective states, but it is not so clear exactly why this happens. Itis an ongoing project for psychologists interested in these findings to determinewhich model best captures the relation between changes in affective states andbehavioural changes.

The experiments that make up the literature on the mood effect – and thosefurther studies which examine the relationship of guilt, empathy, embarrassmentand elation to helping, to name but a few – constitute a key part of the empirical

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The Evidence

work which situationists appeal to. This is because the situational factors whichtrigger changes in affect appear to be very insignificant. They tend to fly underthe radar of our awareness (people do not report that the nice smell of cookies putthem in a good mood when asked why they helped), and they appear to be morallyinsignificant. This all plays into the situationist claim that our behaviour is, toa far greater extent than we expected, the product of insignificant and irrelevantsituational 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 peopleare capable of acting quite badly much of the time – e.g. electrocuting aninnocent learner, or failing to help someone having a seizure – there are otherstudies which seem to show people acting rather well. The situationist is keen toargue that the data I have been discussing so far should not be taken to showthat people are bad. It would be wrong, the situationist tells us, to think thatpeople happily electrocute innocent others, stand idly by whilst they haveseizures, or routinely refuse easily offered help, without also acknowledging thegood behaviour that can also be experimentally observed. Indeed, it is thisfinding – that people seem capable of both highly praiseworthy and highlyblameworthy behaviour – that should be the take home message of the empiricaldata set, according to the situationist. Behaviour is evaluatively inconsistent –people can act very well and very poorly, their behaviour does not seem to fitunder a simple classification of good or bad. What best explains this behaviouralinconsistency is a central question that structures the debate betweensituationists and character theorists. The situationist takes this finding toundermine the idea that we have robust and consistent traits of character. Forthem, the best explanation of behavioural inconsistency involves playing up thecausal importance of situational settings, and seriously downplaying theimportance of character traits in causing behaviour. A key claim of thesituationist is that situational factors swamp dispositional factors in theirinfluence on behaviour (Alfano 2013, 3). I will have more to say on this in thefollowing section.

I have just mentioned that situationists claim some experiments show peopleacting 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 questionwould have on the behaviour of subjects. In the first scenario a confederate lefttheir radio unattended on the beach. The confederate approached the subject andeither said “Excuse me, I’m going up to the boardwalk for a few minutes ... wouldyou watch my things?” or “Excuse me, I’m here alone and have no matches ...

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Situationism

do you have a light?” (372). The confederate then walked away and remainedout of sight. A few minutes later a different confederate came past, picked upthe still playing radio, and walked quickly away in the opposite direction to thefirst confederate. Of the 40 subjects who noticed the theft, 19 out of 20 who hadmade the commitment to “watch the things” pursued and stopped the thief, butonly 4 out of 20 who did not make the commitment did so. The second scenariowas an ‘Automat cafeteria’ in midtown Manhattan. This venue was chosen totest the effect of making a commitment on a different group of people, “employedindividuals of lower socioeconomic status” (374). It was felt that those who wererelaxing on the beach during midweek have fewer distractions, whereas busy cityworkers trying to get a quick lunch might be far less attentive to other people’sbelongings. Once again the confederate asked the subject either to keep an eye ontheir suitcase, or if they had a light for their cigarette. They then left the tableand another confederate took the bag and walked away. In this case, all 8 subjectswho agreed to watch the bag stopped the thief whereas only 1 of 8 subjects whohad not made the commitment did so.

Interestingly, this is not the only experiment which involved theft. Lataneand Darley report on two experiments (1970, 70-77) in which subjects werewitness to a theft and had the opportunity to report it either spontaneously orafter being given a conversational prompt. Whilst between half and two thirds ofsubjects on their own did report the theft in the two cases, that number wentdown to between one quarter and half when subjects were in groups. I reportthese findings to show that it is not theft as such which prompts such high levelsof helping. Rather, the direct request for assistance seems to be making thedifference.

Technician

Russell Clark and Larry Word (1974) investigated the importance of the ambiguityof the need for help on levels of helping. They noticed that among classic bystandereffect studies there were quite high levels of non-helping even among those subjectson their own, e.g. 30% in Latane and Rodin’s (1969) ‘lady in distress’ study. Whilstvarious factors were already shown to have an effect on helping, Clark and Wordwanted to see whether helping would go up in cases where the need was highlyunambiguous. This was achieved by having subjects, on their way back fromcompleting a task, pass by an open door to a room in which they could clearlysee a technician working on some electrical equipment. The ‘emergency’ beganwhen the subject had an unmistakable view of the technician. This consisted in aflash of light and a dull buzzing sound that emanated from the equipment. At thesame time the technician would stiffen his body, give a sharp cry of pain, upsetthe 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 physicalcontact with a number of wires, which represented a danger to anyone trying tohelp. In a second condition the technician fell away from the wires and equipmentsuch that no such physical danger was apparent. The experimenters also ran twovariations which made the emergency more ambiguous. In one case – moderate

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The Evidence

ambiguity – the technician was out of sight. The sound and light cues were thesame, 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 ofthe technician falling was the only indication someone was present. Subjects wereeither alone or in pairs when they encountered the emergency. Subjects in pairshelped 100% of the time when the situation was non-ambiguous, 75% of the timein the moderate ambiguity set-up, and 38% in the high ambiguity case.6 Subjectson their own helped 88%, 75%, and 13% respectively. Clark and Word take thisfinding to show that the level of ambiguity in a helping situation is an importantfactor in the likelihood of a bystander offering assistance.

For a philosophical situationist, like Vranas, these experiments support the ideaof behavioural fragmentation. People can perform admirable as well as deplorableactions if the circumstances enable them. The original interest of the experimenterswas not so much in whether the action was good or bad, but to investigate theconditions under which people would be likely to offer help. These researchers sawin the findings of the bystander effect the importance of situational differences inwhether or not people would help someone in need. These results inspired themto discover what would make people more helpful. It turns out that there are anumber of factors which can contribute to this. We have seen that helping can beinhibited by the presence of inactive bystanders, although there are a number ofsettings 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 whenthe 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 emergencyled to group action rather than inaction. We have also seen that helping can beincreased by things like feeling guilty, temporary feelings of happiness or sorrow,and empathetic feelings. In ‘thief’ and ‘technician’ experimenters found that thedirect request for assistance and the ambiguity of an emergency both correlatewith the level of helping elicited.

In this section, I have been discussing some findings which are representative ofthe empirical work used as the grounds for the situationist challenge to character.The situationist takes these findings to show that people’s behaviour is largelydependent on features of the situation, rather than on robust character traits.Moreover, they argue that some of the apparent causes of this behaviour are minorand morally insignificant and that this result is inconsistent with the widespreadpossession of robust traits of character. Much of the empirical work is in factmeasured through changes in helping behaviour, but there are some other kindsof behaviour examined, too.7 I have not aimed to provide a complete account ofthe evidence that situationists take to support their position, here, but simply arepresentative example of core evidence that helps to explain their view. During

6These numbers are from experiment 2, which improved on the running of the moderateambiguity cases and eliminated the separation of cases where there was danger and cases wherethere was not.

7An 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 explainingsituationism, 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.

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Situationism

this dissertation I will refer to other experiments, and, where necessary, explainthose findings in detail. In the next section I will elucidate the situationist challengein a number of forms, showing how different authors take somewhat differentpositions to be justified from this empirical work.

2.4 Philosophical Situationism

Now that we have a flavour of the kind of empirical evidence produced bypsychologists looking at the influence of situational forces on behaviour, we canmove to the thesis of philosophical situationism. I mentioned, in my discussion ofthe roots of situationism, that a number of philosophers took these findings toraise serious concerns with the notion of character. Because this idea of characteris used in certain ethical theories, situationists think that proponents of thesetheories face a challenge of empirically adequacy. Furthermore, the idea ofcharacter that situationists challenge is also one which can be seen in oureveryday understanding of one another. So the folk psychologist – that is, thewoman on the street – might also have some mental and linguistic pruning to doif she wants to be accurate in her understanding of, and discussion of, otherpeople. So what kind of character is challenged by situationism?

Having a character trait is to have a certain kind of a property which is causallyinvolved with your mental states and subsequent behaviours. For situationists,whilst traits may involve other elements they are not really traits if they do notlead to behaviour. Harman writes:

A person with the relevant character trait has a long term stabledisposition to use the relevant skills in the relevant way. Similarly, thevirtue of benevolence may involve practical knowledge concerning how tobenefit people; but mere possession of that knowledge with no dispositionto use it to benefit people would be insufficient for possession of abenevolent character. (1999, 317)

He also attributes this view to Aristotle:

An honest person is disposed to act honestly. A kind person is disposed toact 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 thatperson is a kind person or an honest person, then they will also have the habit ofdesiring 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 knowthat it will contribute causally towards a certain outcome, which should makethat outcome more likely – and explanatory power – when that outcome occurs,possession of that property is likely to be part of the causal explanation for itsoccurrence. Having this kind of predictive power makes traits ‘counterfactuallyrobust’. That is, we can make claims like ‘if X had been in that situation, then

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Philosophical Situationism

she would have acted kindly’. Having the property of kindness underwrites thiskind of prediction, according to the situationist.

Now, there are a number of nuances in the situationist position. Whilst thereare certain core features – one is not a situationist if one does not think somenotion of character traits is challenged, for example – the extent of the scepticalchallenge, the methodology of arriving at that scepticism, and exactly what weshould be sceptical about can vary. In what follows, I will discuss a number ofdifferent versions of the position, citing the relevant authors along the way. I amnot, here, claiming to represent a particular author in each section – indeed theview of a particular author may have changed over time – but rather, I intend tomap out some important positions within situationism that have received support.I will start with the most radical position before introducing a more moderateversion which includes a role for ‘local’ character traits. I will then discuss theidea of socially-supported traits, socially-supported trait-like behaviour, and finallyconsider a revamped version of situationism, which focuses more explicitly on ourrational capacities and less on character traits as such.

2.4.1 ‘No-Trait Situationism’

Situationism offers a sceptical challenge to character. However, much of thediscussion is about the idea of character traits, so it is perhaps easier tounderstand the challenge as targeting the existence of such traits. The mostradical account of situationism, then, is the view that claims we should besceptical about the existence of character traits altogether. That is, in light ofthe evidence, we have no reason to believe that people have such things ascharacter traits. Call this view ‘no-trait situationism’.

To understand this position we must understand the way in which theempirical evidence is a problem for the idea of character traits. The vital firststep in this argument is the claim that possession of certain character traitscomes with relevant behavioural indicators. For example, if a person has a traitsuch as kindness, then that person will at some time and in some way reveal thetrait through some sort of relevant behaviour. If a person went through life,experienced situations in which kindness was appropriate, and yet never actedkindly 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 thisrelation between traits and behaviour is, and we shall return to these questionslater in the dissertation, but for now it is important to simply have this claim onthe table. At the very least, having a trait can be expected to influence aperson’s behaviour.

With this in place, we can now begin to understand how behavioural datafrom the experiments we have reviewed can tell us something interesting abouta person’s traits. We might expect, for example, that our kind person wouldact kindly in a setting in which that was appropriate. This is especially true

8There is a question about whether a person could – in principle – possess a trait withoutever revealing it. I will have more to say about the metaphysics of traits in chapter 5.

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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 kindyet impatient, and the opportunity to be kind may also be one in which patience isrequired. In such a case the person not acting kindly can be explained by anotheraspect of their character, and the behaviour is not ‘out of character’. So one-offbehavioural examples like this are not going to be very good evidence for sayingwhether or not a person has a particular trait. However, if we think that a personis kind, but see that they do not act kindly in a situation we expect them to, thenthis should put mild pressure on our view of them. Moreover, if we saw that theydid not act kindly in very many of these situations we might seek to find out whynot. If there were no clear explanation which allowed for this behaviour and thebelief that they had the trait of kindness, then we would be justified in changingour view of their character.

We might also expect that a person with such a trait will act kindly in waysthat differ from someone who does not have that trait. They may be kind moreoften, or exhibit greater depths of kindness when they act, or they might givegreater vocal support for acts of kindness, and offer harsher judgments for thosewho are unkind. However, it would be very surprising to find that a person withthis trait was no more kind than someone without it. So another way that thebehavioural data might be problematic for attributions of traits like these is if theyrevealed that people’s behaviour did not differ one from another. At least, thiswould 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 theirunique 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 warrantthis latter conclusion.

One author who seems at times to endorse this view is Harman (2000, 2003). Heis 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 emphasizesvarious ways in which our reliance on notions of character can lead to majorproblems. In particular, he highlights the way we understand violent conflicts orpolitical troubles through the lens of character (1999, 329). We assume that it isthe 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, suchas 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 characterwe are misconceiving the notion, but also that there are serious consequences thatfollow from this. For this reason he makes the suggestion that we would be betteroff doing away with character trait notions altogether:

I myself think it is better to abandon all thought and talk of character andvirtue. I believe that ordinary thinking in terms of character traits hasdisastrous effects on people’s understanding of each other, on theirunderstandings of what social programs are reasonable to support, and oftheir understandings of international affairs. I think we need to get peopleto stop doing this. We need to convince people to look at situational

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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 tosave 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 theirpossession of such traits and virtues” (1999, 317). At times it seems that for himthe question of whether people have character traits collapses to the question ofwhether people differ in character traits (e.g. 2000, 223). This idea isparticularly 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 heis careful to point out that there are many varieties of virtue ethics, and onlycertain types are challenged by situationism. For example, a virtue ethics whichemphasised the idea of virtue as an ideal to guide our moral actions, but did notclaim that such an ideal could ever be reached, would not be challenged by thesituationist claim that nothing like a virtue is found when we look at real people’sbehaviour. On the no-trait view, any ethical theories – not just virtue ethicaltheories – that rely on the idea that people routinely have character traits, facesa challenge of empirical adequacy. If this is simply the wrong view of what peopleare 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 ofcertain kinds of character traits. On this account the empirical evidence warrantsscepticism about the existence of global character traits, but is compatible withthe existence of local traits. A local trait is one for which the conditions ofmanifestation must be specified to quite a degree, for example ‘lunchtime at workchattiness’, or ‘under fire with comrades bravery’ (see Doris 2002, 25). Call thisview ‘local-trait situationism’.

This view is defended by Doris (1998, 2002), and is perhaps the most widelydiscussed version of situationism. Doris defines ‘globalism’ as a combination of thefollowing three theses:

(1) Consistency. Character and personality traits are reliably manifestedin trait-relevant eliciting conditions that may vary widely in theirconduciveness to the manifestation of the trait in question.(2) Stability. Character and personality traits are reliably manifested intrait-relevant behaviors over iterated trials of similar trait-relevant elicitingconditions.(3) Evaluative integration. In a given character or personality theoccurrence of a trait with a particular evaluative valence isprobabilistically related to the occurrence of other traits with similarevaluative valences. (2002, 22)

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Situationism

He takes situationism to be a qualified rejection of globalism. Situationism,according to Doris has three central commitments of its own:

(1) Behavioral variation across a population owes more to situationaldifferences than to dispositional differences among persons. Individualdispositional differences are not so behaviorally individuating as mighthave been supposed; to a surprising extent it is safest to predict, for aparticular situation, that a person will behave in a fashion similar to thepopulation norm.(2) Systematic observation problematizes the attribution of robust traits.People will quite typically behave inconsistently with respect to theattributive standards associated with a trait, and whatever behavioralconsistency is displayed may be readily disrupted by situational variation.This is not to deny the existence of stability; the situationist acknowledgesthat individuals may exhibit behavioral regularity over iterated trials ofsubstantially similar situations.(3) Personality is not often evaluatively integrated. For a given person, thedispositions operative in one situation may have an evaluative status verydifferent from those manifested in another situation; evaluativelyinconsistent dispositions may ‘cohabitate’ in a single personality. (2002,24-25)

The reason Doris takes situationism to be only a ‘qualified’ rejection of globalismis that the second globalist thesis – stability – receives empirical support, as canbe seen in the second situationist thesis. On this basis he argues for the empiricalviability of local traits. The behavioural evidence that supports situationism isconsistent with many people possessing these sorts of traits of character. Forexample, a key early experiment (Hartshorne and May 1928) found that childrenwho were given the opportunity to cheat, steal and lie in a number of different waysdid not reveal the kind of behavioural consistency that would justify calling themeither ‘honest’ or ‘dishonest’. That is, a particular child cheating in one settinghad only a very low correlation with their cheating in other settings. If one thoughtthat there was such a thing as a dishonest child, for example, one might expectthat 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 fairlyspecified setting – such as on an ‘answer key exam’, was a quite strong predictorof cheating in a similar setting. This evidence, for Doris, is compatible with theexistence of a local trait such as ‘answer key exam dishonest’. This means that aperson with such a trait can be expected to reliably cheat in such a situation, butnot necessarily in others. We can see that such a trait has the property of stabilitybut not of consistency.9

On the basis of this claim that local traits exist, Doris develops the

9Strictly speaking a local trait could be taken to have the property of consistency. If onedefines the trait-relevant eliciting conditions in terms of the local trait, then the local traitmanifests reliably, it simply has a very narrow range of eliciting conditions. (My thanks to PaulineKleingeld for highlighting this point) Whilst his wording is vague, I take Doris to understand theeliciting conditions in terms of a global trait, such that a local trait does not have the propertyof consistency.

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fragmentation theory. According to this theory, people have a large number ofthese local traits which play a role in their behaviour, but there is no reason tothink that people have more global traits, and we have no evidence that theselocal traits are evaluatively consistent. That is, we have no reason to believe thatif a person has many local kindness-related traits this person will have few localcruelty-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 istrue of both global and local traits. They are both taken to have predictive andexplanatory power and to be counterfactually robust. Local traits, of course, areonly counterfactually robust over the situations specified, whereas global traitsare supposed to be robust over the full range of situations where a trait such askindness would be applicable. The important difference, then, is this range ofapplicable situations. It is this property – cross-situational consistency – thatglobal traits are supposed to have but local traits are not. It is this property thatDoris takes the empirical record to challenge. To the extent that people have atrait like kindness, he thinks, it is not stable across situations. Or, to put itanother way, having a trait like kindness seems to lose its predictive power whenwe consider it across the full range of situations. Doris tells us that the morefine-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 keyexam dishonest’ will allow you to make somewhat reliable predictions about thatperson’s behaviour in such situations. It might be that if the trait is furtherspecified to ‘answer key exam dishonest when in a group’ it is an even betterpredictor of behaviour. On the other hand, as we have seen, if it becomes themore general ‘exam dishonest’, the reliability of our predictions will decrease.

Now, local traits are supposed to also have explanatory power, so the claimis not just that there is a strong correlation between behaviours of this sort, butthat the person has a property described by the trait. This property is causallyinvolved in the behaviour, and thus offers a partial explanation of it.

This view is not unanimous in the situationist camp. As we have seen, somesituationists are sceptical about traits in general, and Harman seems to beunconvinced by the idea that local traits exist. He suggests that suchbehavioural regularity can be explained using other, non-trait, features ofpsychology, such as stable goals or strategies. Consider, for example, the localtraits of ‘lunchtime at work chattiness’. Whilst Doris might claim that thisregular behaviour is evidence of such a trait, Harman argues that it can also beexplained by positing a kind of social strategy grounded in the desire to havegood workplace relations. A worker with this strategy might see lunchtime as thebest opportunity to socialise with colleagues, and thus consistently displaychattiness in this setting. For Harman, such a strategy can explain the behaviourwithout having to posit a local trait. Moreover, he suggests that this picture oflocal traits is not one which people have in mind when they think of charactertraits (1999, 326). Here we can see evidence of the different points of enquirythat Harman and Doris begin from. Harman is concerned with the idea thatpeople 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 startingpoint. Doris is more interested in identifying whether there are any kinds ofcharacter traits that have a claim to empirical adequacy. From this beginning heidentifies local traits as just such a case.

Whilst the case of local traits splits the situationist community, there is ashared conclusion that global traits lack empirical support. I have mentioned inthis section that Doris takes traits’ predictive power to increase the more localthey become. This entails that the more global a trait is, the lower its predictivepower. So a general situationist conclusion – which we could say is a core beliefof the view – is that global traits lack empirical support. However, there is nota clear cut-off point on the global-local scale marking when traits are empiricallyviable.

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, andthe more moderate ‘local-trait situationism’ allows that local traits receiveempirical support. Another way in which the strength of traits can be challengedby the data is by focusing on the motivational force internal to those traits. Thisfocus on internal motivational force is simply one way of describing what itwould mean for a trait to be robust enough to play a reliable causal role acrossmany situations. Consider the global trait of courage. I have already describedhow possession of that property would ground certain kinds of predictions andexplanations. This is because the trait is playing an important role in causingthe relevant (courageous) behaviour. The idea can be brought out by returningto the idea of such traits having counterfactual weight. A person may never facea challenge requiring courage, but we can say of the courageous person that werethey to be in such a situation, then their trait of courage would play a role in theway they act. We also want to say that if a person’s courageous acts would stilloccur even if they lacked the trait of courage, then this trait is not playing animportant causal role, and can be discarded from our explanation. If it turns outthat such a trait is always superfluous to the explanation of the behaviour thenwe have less and less reason to claim it exists. In terms of the causal explanationit is an unnecessary add-on.

Now, in challenging the empirical adequacy of global traits the situationistcan put pressure on this counterfactual claim. They might allow that manypeople are courageous on occasion, even that some people display frequent orreliable courageous behaviour (or perhaps some other trait-relevant behaviour iffrequent courage seems too unlikely). However, the situationist might argue thatthis behaviour is the product of external features of the situation which areconducive to this behaviour. Remove these features and the behaviour willdisappear. In other words, the trait of courage, in so far as anyone has it, is notstrong enough to generate the relevant behaviour without certain kinds of socialor situational support. Maria Merritt (2000, 2009) develops a position alongthese lines. She makes the claim that traits of this sort – socially-supported

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traits – are commonplace in the population. However, she argues, the picture ofvirtues that can be found in the work of Aristotle is of traits which are reliableindependent of situational support. Hence she writes:

Aristotle requires that genuine virtues be firmly secured in one’s ownindividual constitution, in such a way that one’s reliability in making goodpractical choices depends as little as possible on contingent externalfactors. (2000, 375)

Consider, for example, the prisoner of war who holds his nerve during hisimprisonment, who endures mistreatment and psychological pressure, and whodoes not make confessions under duress or give up vital information. This personmight rightly be said to have the virtue of courage (or perhaps resilience orsomething similar). In these unfamiliar surroundings, without the support ofallies, friends, normal avenues for complaint and protection, he still demonstratesvirtuous behaviour. This sort of trait, Merritt says, is one which has motivationalself-sufficiency (2000, 365). Now, Merritt takes the empirical record to challengethe widespread possession of these kinds of traits, but she allows that it iscompatible with the widespread possession of traits which are socially-supported.That is, many people are friendly and chatty in everyday life; many others aregrumpy and terse every day. However, the former group might have goodrelations with the people they see everyday and the latter might have a longcommute in hot and stressful conditions. If those people found themselves in theother setting, then their behaviour might shift. Thus, whilst we can go as far asattributing a socially-supported trait of friendliness to the first group and ofgrumpiness to the second, we are not justified in thinking such traits havemotivational self-sufficiency. This is not to say that everyone who happens to likethe people they see everyday is friendly and everyone who has a difficultcommute is grumpy. There are personal differences, which is why these peoplecan still be thought of as having socially-supported traits. For Merritt, thechallenge of situationism is felt most strongly by theories which are committed tothe 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 thisproperty. Thus, she recommends that those interested in theorising about virtueshift to more Humean versions if they want to accommodate the findings ofsituationism (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, orscepticism about global traits, where that focus might be on cross-situationalstability or on the idea that traits should be motivationally independent fromsocial or situational support. There are other differences within the situationistcamp; namely, differences regarding the use of character trait attributions andtrait language more generally. In section 4.1, I discussed the view, defended by

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Harman, that situationism should lead us to eliminate character trait discoursealtogether. An alternative view holds that ontological scepticism about globaltraits (or traits in general) need not lead us to eliminativism. The question ofwhat we should do with our trait terms is separate from the question of whetheror not people have such traits. If we assume for a moment that people do nothave global traits (or traits in general) what should we change about the way wetalk about character? Harman offers a number of reasons why we should do awaywith character trait talk, around the general theme that employing this kind ofmisleading language leads to a number of subsequent harms. However, even ifthat were so, these harms would need to outweigh the costs of eliminating theuse of trait terms from our discourse and any benefits that such use brings. Thisside of the equation is not much addressed by Harman. One author who doesaddress it is Mark Alfano (2013). He offers evidence in support of the view thattrait attributions, in just the right circumstances, can bring about trait-likebehaviour. So calling someone generous, in the right circumstances, might bringabout generous behaviour. Using trait attributions to encourage desirablebehaviour suggests that trait language might be a useful part of our socialdiscourse after all. How exactly does this work?

Alfano looks at the literature on the effect of ‘labelling’, which seems to showthat attributing a label in the right circumstances affects people’s behaviour. Forexample, one oft-mentioned study (Miller, Brickman and Bolen 1975) comparedthe effects of exhorting a group of children to keep their classroom tidy with(falsely) congratulating a different group for their above-average tidiness. Theresearchers found that whilst exhortation had a short term impact, the childrenquickly returned to their untidy behaviour, but those children who were labelledas 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 truthas a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the point of utterance it is not reporting a truestate of affairs, but the act of utterance, in the right circumstances, will establishits truth. As a comparison, Alfano describes how the Chairman of the FederalReserve 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, hisact of saying so will ensure its truth, as investors will act accordingly which itselfwill cause the crash (2013, 86). It is important to note that the announcementmust be done in a certain way to have this effect. It must be believed for investorsto act accordingly, so if the Chairman made this claim as part of a stand-up routineit 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 personto act accordingly. Moreover, the attribution must also be in public to an audiencethat 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 verymettle being attributed. [... But] if you call someone honest, he will onlybegin to conduct himself honestly if he understands what honesty entails.(2013, 92-93)

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It is important for the person to hear the attribution and to believe it plausibleand for there to be an audience who will then form a certain conception of thatperson as having that trait (which gives the person a standard to live up to, andpeople in whose eyes they would be failing if they did not). It is, therefore, alsoimportant that both the person and the audience have a correct conception ofwhat 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 factitiousattributions, but it will suffice for what I want to say here. The important pointis that under certain conditions it will be beneficial to use the language ofcharacter traits, and thus, for a situationist of this persuasion, it would be unwiseto seek to eliminate these terms from our use altogether. Alfano’s discussion ofsituationism is an interesting development because it focuses much more on theepistemological questions related to character traits. It is important to be clearthat one part of the situationist view is an ontological claim, about whether ornot character traits of this sort exist. It is a separate question, albeit one whichis intimately connected, what we can know about character traits, whether otherpeople’s or our own. Alfano’s factitious attributions relate to this topic as thetrait-relevant behaviour we might hope to elicit relies on what we believe aboutour own and other people’s traits. He also forays into epistemological questionswhen he gives a detailed account of numerous heuristics and biases which arecommon to folk psychology, arguing that the combination of these effects wouldlead us to believe in the existence of character traits even if they do not in factexist (2011).10

2.4.5 Situationism Updated: Internal Aspects of MoralCognition

So far I have outlined a number of positions within situationism and mentionedsome authors who have defended positions of these kinds. Needless to say, thesearguments have not been left unanswered. Many philosophers have raisedobjections against situationism, either directly in defence of virtue ethics orsimply by way of showing flaws in the situationist’s arguments. I will discusssome of these counter-arguments in the chapters to follow. Here I want to brieflyintroduce what might be thought of as an updated view of situationism offeredby Merritt, Doris, and Harman in a chapter of ‘The Moral PsychologyHandbook’ (Doris 2010). The view is updated because it aims, in part, torespond to some of the criticisms which had been set against situationism at thatpoint. I will engage with this work more fully in chapter 5.

In their own words, this incarnation of the situationist challenge seeks todetermine “in what circumstances human cognition deserves the philosophicalhonorific ‘practical rationality”’(2010, 392). This version of their argument,

10He also argues that the structure of situationist arguments against virtues and vices in themoral domain can also be applied to virtues and vices in the domain of epistemology (2012). Inthis way he builds an argument against virtue epistemology. I will not say more about this topichere, but this expansion of the situationist challenge to areas outside the moral domain opensup interesting possibilities for future research.

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whilst a continuation of the situationist arguments I have already outlined, ismarked by a focus on the internal aspects of cognition, and the way in whichsituational cues influence these cognitive processes. The authors take this pictureof human cognition to cast doubt on whether people typically have the faculty ofpractical rationality as it is understood in virtue ethical (and other) theories. Inmy view, this work represents an attempt to fill in the details behind the originalsituationist arguments about the unreliable connection between apparentcharacter traits and behaviour. It shifts emphasis from the behaviouralarguments described in this chapter to a focus on the internal world of moralcognition. However, discussion of this internal aspect of traits was already a partof earlier situationist argument (for example, Doris 2002, 17), and Merritt et al.clearly rely on the behavioural evidence as well, which suggests they still takethis to be a central weapon in the situationist arsenal. Consequently, this workshould be thought of as a development of the core situationist argument, ratherthan a radical change.

The shift in emphasis puts the focus on the internal world, on the role ofrationality, values, and perception in action. The authors point to experimentalresults showing that people’s choices can be affected by the way a question isframed (Tversky and Kahneman 1981). They cite evidence showing that‘priming’ people with words related to groups – ‘we’ and ‘our’ – or words relatedto individuals – ‘I’ and ‘my’ – has an effect on what sort of values they report asbeing ‘guiding principles in their lives’. They also point to the suggestion byJohn Darley and Daniel Batson (1973, 107-108) that certain situational factorsmay affect people’s perception of a situation (at least the normative features ofit). The authors argue that these findings show the malleability of people’svalues, 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 inmuch ethical theory is problematic (2010, 362). In particular, the authorshighlight two issues which they see as a serious challenge to the traditionalpicture of people engaging in practical reasoning. First, they point to the factthat people seem to endorse certain moral standards yet they routinely act inways that are contrary to those standards (363-367). They label thisphenomenon ‘moral dissociation’. Second, they note that people’s attention totheir environments seems to vary a great deal, and this fact sits uncomfortablywith the idea that good moral agents are reliably sensitive to the moral facts ofthe world around them (381-385). In other words, if our attention is easilycaught by certain features of our surroundings – and perhaps in ways which arenot immediately obvious to us – it seems wrong to think that we can reliably beaware of those moral features of our surroundings which place demands on us asmoral agents. To give a brief example, we might miss the fact that a homelessperson is having medical difficulties nearby and needs our help because thesmells, sounds, and lights of the restaurant in front of us are so attentiongrabbing, or just because we are in deep conversation with a friend. The authorsargue that the current picture of human cognition indicates that much of the waythat we perceive, evaluate, reason about, and interact with the world around usrelies on subconscious processes which are not amenable to our rational control.

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To give one example, many people have subconscious biases against certain racesor other social groups, often embodying socially reinforced stereotypes(Greenwald and Banaji 1995). Whilst these biases need not be endorsed by theperson in question – indeed they usually are not – they can influence the way weperceive people (judging them to be more or less threatening, for example), andas a result the way we reason about how to interact with them. Whilst we maybe quite committed to the idea that race is not a morally relevant factor (or evena distinction which captures a class at all) these biases still influence the way weperceive, 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 incomplete conscious control of these aspects of cognition.

In a separate piece, Alfano (2013, 40) argues for a related point. He notesthat the most disconcerting aspect of the situationist challenge is the idea thatwe are routinely influenced by “situational non-reasons”. These are factors whichinfluence our behaviour in ways that are not clearly rational. In contrast, peoplesometimes act in ways which they would not endorse, but which are perfectlyrational. 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 someuseful examples). These people may well think such behaviour is not appropriate,but the opportunity to make some extra money tempts them into doing so. Suchtemptations might be morally troublesome for us, but they are not so much achallenge to character. The idea of temptation and of good people succumbing toit has always been a part of the picture of moral character. Rather, it is those newand interesting findings that show people’s behaviour to be influenced by factorswhere there appears to be no rational explanation that are more worrying. Wecan think here particularly of those factors which are recorded in the mood effect –smells, light levels, temperature, etc. Behaviour being influenced by these factorsseems to undermine the picture of people as fully rational agents in control of theirbehaviour. This aspect of situationism has come to the fore in recent work on thesubject.

2.4.6 Normative Conclusions of Situationism

Proponents of situationism differ not only in terms of the type of character theytake to be challenged and the methodology they follow in justifying thatchallenge. They also differ in the prescriptive conclusions they take to bewarranted by these arguments. Harman’s eliminativism about character comesfrom his more radical version of character scepticism. He thinks that we ought tostop thinking in character terms and that doing so will have serious benefits interms of our understanding of political strife, as well as our understanding of oneanother. Once we see the flaws in characterological thinking we should be moretolerant of one another, in part because we can see the influence of moral luck inother people’s actions. Sometimes people find themselves in morally dangeroussituations and we should be slow to blame them for their actions (or at least toattribute those actions to their characters).

Doris also discusses some prescriptive conclusions that we can take from the

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situationist argument. Like Harman, and unsurprisingly, he suggests that weshould 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 inthe light of situationism, he suggests that we can actually improve our moralbehaviours with this information. We should, he tells us, avoid morallydangerous situations rather than trusting that we are strong willed enough tocope with those dangers. If we have a project to finish this evening it would beunwise to join friends at the pub after work for ‘one drink’, trusting that we willstick to this limit and get our work done. For sure, we might be able to, but thelure 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 avoidtemptation (2002, 146-149).

As we have seen, Merritt thinks that a Humean account of virtues survivesthe empirical concerns raised by situationism. In general, situationists make clearthat some versions of virtue ethics might not face the challenge, but note thatother ethical theories may also need to meet this empirical burden of proof.These conclusions are not prescriptions for moral agents in general, but forethical theorists.

Merritt also argues that the character traits we have rely on reinforcementfrom other people. This does not necessarily mean that other people have to bepresent at the moment of action, but that our dispositional motivations to act relyon a general reinforcement from particular individuals with whom we share values(2009, 36). However, she thinks that these interpersonal processes reinforcingbehaviour can sometimes be detrimental. She points out that in experimentalconditions, subjects will often decide to act in ways that they believe the audiencefinds acceptable, thus bypassing the need to independently evaluate the situation(43). We can imagine how easily this leads to immoral behaviour under morallydangerous circumstances, such as in a warzone. Merritt points out that when thepreferences of the audience are not known, subjects are forced to deliberate aboutthe right thing to do. Thus, she recommends making people aware that theywill be held accountable but without indicating the preferences of the audience(43). More generally, Merritt thinks that we should utilise the finding that ourjudgments and decision-making are highly reliant on interpersonal evaluations toenable people to make better moral decisions.

Finally, Alfano has developed an argument for a different way that we canimprove moral behaviour, one that does not simply focus on situationmanagement. 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 theopportune moment, he argues, we have reason to believe people will act in linewith this attribution, even if they do not really have the virtue in question.

So there is a range of normative and prescriptive conclusions that situationistsdraw from their argument. Moreover, the conclusions one arrives at will depend,to some extent, on the version of situationism that one finds most persuasive. Iwill not be taking direct issue with any of these prescriptions, indeed some ofthem may constitute wise advice. Rather, I will develop challenges against thecore situationist argument. In the final chapter I will return to the topic of ways

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Conclusion

we might hope to improve ourselves and our behaviour, in light of the argumentsI have made.

2.5 Conclusion

The aim of this chapter has been to familiarise the reader with situationism. I havegiven a brief background to the position, before spending the bulk of the chapterdescribing 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 – virtueethics and trait psychology – have responded to this challenge. My aim is notto defend either of these positions, but to outline the core set of responses fromthese fields. I will argue that despite there being a range of interesting replies tosituationism, which have helped to clarify the challenge and what is at stake, thesituationist challenge remains unmet. Then, in chapters 4 and 5 I will develop myown line of response to situationism.

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