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Virtue Cultivation in Light of Situationism
Christian B. Miller
Wake Forest University
Various themes have been discussed under the heading of ‘situationism’ in psychology over the past forty years. Much of this discussion has been extremely controversial, leading to deep divisions among psychologists and, more recently, among philosophers as well. In this paper I will pick up on one of those themes having to do with the influence of certain unconscious mental dispositions. I will assume that these dispositions are widely possessed, and also that they disqualify the people who have them from counting as virtuous at that moment. The majority of the paper will then consider various strategies for trying to still develop the virtues in the face of this particular obstacle.
More specifically, I will proceed as follows. Section one will briefly review the relevant results from the situationist tradition, and focus in particular on these unconscious dispositions. Sections two through four will evaluate three strategies for virtue cultivation which I do not take to be very promising. Section five then concludes more positively with a promising approach but also a residual worry about its limitations.
1. Situationism and Virtue Cultivation
To begin, it is important to distinguish between the situationist movement in psychology, the situationist movement in philosophy, and the various particular experiments which have been connected to each. Even in psychology, there is no one position or set of clearly articulated claims which goes by the name of ‘situationism.’[1] For instance, the claim that the situationist position is perhaps most famous for advocating can be formulated as follows:
Trait Rarity
There is a large body of experimental evidence which is incompatible with the widespread possession of certain traits.
The conception of traits which is being called into question involves broad or global traits which are cross-situationally consistent and situation or context free.[2] These should sound like fairly traditional features of traits, and examples would include honesty and compassion as ordinarily understood.
Trait Rarity is an important claim, and one that I have discussed at length elsewhere.[3] Here, though, my focus will not be on this negative claim about our lack of certain traits, but rather on a positive situationist claim about the powerful role of situations in explaining much of our behavior. The idea gets expressed in stronger and weaker forms by situationists. An extreme version is that:
(a) Behavior is entirely a product of situational forces. Personality does not make any causal contribution.[4]
More restrained and defensible than this claim is that:
(b) Behavior is primarily a product of situational forces. Personality only has a modest causal contribution to make.[5]
What should be made of these claims?
There is good reason to reject them. One is that the situations which we encounter do not directly produce intentional actions on our part. Rather, their influence is shaped by our mental states, i.e., our beliefs and desires and the interpretations which we give to situations. It is not the situation of being near a woman with a torn bag leaking candy that leads me to help by picking up the candy. It is my interpretation of that situation as an opportunity to help, perhaps along with a desire to help so as to avoid feeling guilty if I don’t, and various beliefs about what would count as helping in this context, which are what jointly cause the formation of a desire to pick up the candy and in turn cause this actual behavior. The causal relationship also often goes in the other direction as well; our mental states have a significant impact on creating, selecting, and shaping the situations in which we are present.[6] Stepping back, then, my behavior is directly the product of mental forces and only indirectly of situational ones (as they impact my mind), with both forces working together in an interactive relationship to produce this output.[7]
Another reason for suspicion is that personality and situations need not be thought of in ‘zero-sum’ terms, where the leftover variance not accounted for by a personality variable must thereby be accounted for by a situation variable. It could at least partially be accounted for in terms of person x situation interactions and other personality variables, i.e., other traits or more specific mental states. This is a familiar point from the psychology literature, but is rarely made in the philosophy one.[8] It has been explored more rigorously in a well-known paper by David Funder and Daniel Ozer (1983). They took several classic experiments in the situationist tradition and calculated correlations between behaviors and situational variables. Here were the results:[9]
Behavior Situational Variable Correlation Study
Attribute Report Incentive for Advocacy -.36 Festinger and Carlsmith 1959
Bystander Intervention Hurry -.39 Darley and Batson 1973
Bystander Intervention Number of Onlookers -.38 Darley and Latané 1968
Obedience Victim’s Isolation .42 Milgram 1974
Obedience Proximity of Authority .36 Milgram 1974
The upshot is that these correlations with respect to situational variables were not much greater than the personality correlations reported by situationists, and yet the situational variables were clearly highly important in these studies. As Funder and Ozer note, “situational effects need not explain large percentages of the behavioral variance in order to be important; we suggest this might also be true of person effects.”[10]
Despite these concerns about the situationist claims in (a) and (b) above, a more charitable interpretation of the basic idea can be formulated as follows:
Surprising Dispositions
The behavior of most individuals tends to be influenced by various situational forces which activate certain of our mental dispositions – certain beliefs, desires, emotions, and the like. Furthermore, the functioning of these dispositions and their degree of impact on behavior are underappreciated by both ordinary people and even trained philosophers and psychologists. We can call them ‘Surprising Dispositions.’[11]
Here are some examples of these dispositions:
Beliefs and desires concerned with harming others in order to maintain a positive opinion
of myself.[12]
Beliefs and desires concerned with harming others in order to obey instructions from a
legitimate authority.[13]
Desires concerned with helping when doing so will contribute towards extending my
good mood, and more so than any alternative reasonable means of doing so which is thought to be available.[14]
Desires concerned with not helping when helping is thought to potentially earn the
disapproval of those observing me.[15]
Desires concerned with cheating when the benefits of cheating (significantly) outweigh
the costs, while also desiring as much as possible to still be thought of as an honest person by oneself and others.[16]
Many other examples could also be given. What is going to be true of all these beliefs and desires is that they often operate unconsciously in most people, and especially in those who do not have a background in psychological research. For instance it is well known that ordinary estimates of people’s willingness to obey authority figures in doing horrendous actions are much lower than is reflected in actual behavior. Similarly, it is widely accepted by psychologists that fear of earning the disapproval of observers plays a significant role in studies of group helping, and yet notoriously participants in those studies do not cite the role of unresponsive group members in explaining their failures to help.[17]
Why should we believe that these Surprising Dispositions are even present in the first place in most people? Here situationists in psychology will point to a number of relevant studies, and given limitations of space I will only mention a few of them:
Dime in the Phone Booth. Finding a dime or not in the coin return slot of a phone booth seemed to make a significant difference (88% versus 4%) to whether a participant would subsequently help picked up dropped papers. There were replication problems with this study, but other studies on mood effects found a similar pattern.[18]
Lady in Distress. In Latané and Rodin’s classic 1969 “Lady in Distress” experiment, the main dependent variable was whether participants exhibited any helping behavior after hearing a loud crash in the next room and a woman’s scream, followed by cries of pain from a bookshelf apparently having fallen on top of her. Participants alone in the next room helped 70% of the time, while a participant in the same room with an unresponsive confederate helped only 7% of the time.[19]
Obedience to Authority. In experiment 5, the most famous version of Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments, 65% of participants inflicted apparently lethal 450 volt XXX shocks, and 80% gave shocks which were at least at the 270 volt level, to an innocent test taker in another room under pressure from an experimenter. This despite the fact that at 270 volts the test taker was heard making agonizing screams and demanding to be let out, with the pleas getting desperate and hysterical at higher levels.[20]
Less familiar but also worth noting, are the following two studies:
Bathroom. 45% of participants agreed to deliver some documents 40 meters away in the control condition of a study by Cann and Blackwelder, but 80% of people did so in the experimental condition. The only difference was that these participants had just exited a public bathroom.[21]
Icy Hot Pads. Williams and Bargh gave participants the option of receiving either a “gift to treat a friend” or a personal reward to keep for themselves.[22] In one group, 75% kept the gift for themselves, whereas in the second group, only 46% did.[23] The only difference was whether the participants were asked to hold a hot or cold “Icy Hot” therapeutic pad as part of a product evaluation.
We can see how someone might connect these particular studies to the existence and influence of various Surprising Dispositions – studies such as these may reveal the existence and causally significant influence of dispositions to, for instance, obey authority figures (Obedience to Authority), relieve feelings of embarrassment (Bathroom), or maintain a good mood (Dime in the Phone Booth).[24]
My view is that psychologists have indeed provided us with ample empirical evidence to support the claim that there are many Surprising Dispositions which are widely held and which, when activated or triggered, can have a significant impact on our thoughts, motivation, and behavior. In my previous work, I have gone to some length in trying to carefully understand some of these dispositions in light of the best empirical evidence, but I will not be able to reproduce that discussion here.[25]
Instead let me shift from the descriptive observations that have been made so far, to a more normative discussion of the moral quality of these Surprising Dispositions. Here I claim that dispositions like those listed above are not constitutes of the moral virtues as those traits are understood in the Aristotelian tradition of ethics. The first two are incompatible with the virtue of non-malevolence, the next two are incompatible with the virtue of compassion, and the final one is incompatible with the virtue of honesty. I hope that this is easy enough to see, but I also argue for it at length elsewhere by formulating specific normative criteria for these virtues and then comparing them to the above dispositions to see how well they match up. The short answer is: not well at all.[26]
Given the widespread and causally significant unconscious functioning of these non-virtuous dispositions, I have come to believe that we have good reason to accept the following:
Lack of Traditional Virtue
In light of the psychological evidence, we are justified in believing on the basis of that evidence that most people do not possess the traditional virtues such as honesty or compassion.
Fortunately I am not the only one who has come to this conclusion. There is an emerging consensus among many philosophers working on character that Lack of Traditional Virtue is correct, and arguably it was even Aristotle’s own position. It is also a conclusion shared by leading situationists in philosophy, especially Gilbert Harman in a series of articles beginning in 1999 and John Doris in his 2002 book Lack of Character.[27]
But if most people lack the traditional virtues, what positive descriptive story should be told instead about character? Here there are a number of options available, including:
Most people have the traditional vices to some degree.
Most people have local virtues or vices to some degree, which are indexed to very
specific situations such as honesty in the courtroom or compassion in the mall.
Most people have Mixed Traits to some degree, which are cross-situationally consistent
and stable over time, but are neither traditional moral virtues nor traditional moral vices.
Most people do not have any moral character traits of any kind and to any degree.
Fortunately for my purposes here we do not need to take a stand on this still lively debate, although I do think Mixed Traits are the way to go.[28]
Instead with this background in place, I want to now turn to the topic of virtue cultivation. Given Lack of Traditional Virtue, it seems that a central project, if not the central project, for those interested in fostering the traditional Aristotelian virtues would be something like the following:
Virtue Cultivation Strategies: Develop one or more realistic and empirically informed ways for most human beings to avoid falling short of virtue in the course of their upbringing, or if they have already fallen short by adulthood, to improve so that they can still develop a virtuous character over time.
This is a very large and ambitious project, and one which far exceeds the scope of this paper. My concern here will be on just one aspect of this project:
Virtue Cultivation Strategies Focused on Situationism: Develop one or more realistic and empirically informed ways for most human beings to avoid falling short of virtue in the course of their upbringing because of the presence and role of the Surprising Dispositions, or if they have already fallen short by adulthood, to overcome their Surprising Dispositions so that they can still develop a virtuous character over time.
Clearly there is much more to a story about virtue cultivation than just trying to overcoming the Surprising Dispositions. There are all kinds of problematic conscious psychological obstacles, such as mistaken moral beliefs, weakness of will, overly strong emotional responses, lethargy, and so forth. But no matter how much we might improve in these respects, we will inevitably fall short of being even weakly virtuous if, unconsciously, we also have the Surprising Dispositions playing a significant causal role.