Some actions are flukes, or in the situation. Not everything indicates a more general pattern, and even if it does, it’s not always obvious what it is indicating. But I think it’s not a controversial point to make that as you get to know someone over a very long period of time, there are aspects of their character that you become very familiar with. Which aspects in particular depends upon the situations you’ve been able to seem them in, especially what situations you’ve seen them in repeatedly.

That’s all I mean. I don’t think you can distill everything about a person from a specific action. If you look at my example about the competence of the two technicians, I think that the same actions can in fact be interpreted in entirely opposite ways, depending on the prior history of the person who takes it.

I have to begin by going after the two experiments that you cite. I always find attempts to interpret the prison and obedience experiment frustrating because:

1. Their samples were tiny
2. Their samples were nonrandom

Just to name my two hard and fast critiques of those widely cited experiments. Also, having “absolutely no measurable psychological abnormalities” doesn’t tell you much, because psychological abnormalities aren’t something you can measure like weight or height. We hardly know anything about psychological normalities much less deviations.

But to get to the substance of your post.

In many ways I think economics often assumes an implicitly situationist view of humanity. Economists think that there are very specific ways that people respond to particular situations and the incentives created by those situations, but for the most part even informal analysis often treats humans as mostly the same except for their circumstances.

The difference between what a congressman does and what a businessman does is explained mostly by the incentives they face; that is the heart of economics.

However, I think most people agree that this analysis, while powerful, leaves out a lot more than it accounts for. The differences between Mother Teresa and your average Joe may be fewer than the differences between either of them and a chimp, but I think that it’s not difficult to make the argument that significant differences do exist.

Let me put this another way. After knowing me for many years you may judge me to be someone you can trust to look after your house while you’re away without having to worry about me stealing anything. In other words, you judge me to have a fairly trustworthy character.

Then one day I’m put into a situation where I can steal a lot of money, from someone I will never have contact with again, and I can be very confident that no one will ever know. How I respond to that situation will tell you something about my character, but it is a different something from what you learned that lead you to trust me with your house.

Rather, the fact that you can trust not to steal from you doesn’t mean that you know me well enough to say that I would never steal from anyone under any circumstances. If I didn’t steal in the extreme example outlined above, that would tell you that I had a character that was more robust than usual to that sort of temptation. But even then, it could be that even though I wouldn’t steal under those circumstances alone, I might do it if I was poorer, and someone I loved (or I myself) needed to have an expensive medical procedure.

What I’m saying is that people do, in fact, behave differently under different circumstances. That does not mean that character doesn’t exist; it is in fact how they react to those specific circumstances that tells you more about the kind of person that they are.

If a general character does not exist, then I don’t see how morality can. But I’m willing to have it explained to me :)

I just have a question about the situationism stuff. You’ll have to bear with me, though. This is stuff I haven’t really had the opportunity to think about it since my first semester at GSU. But I still find it really interesting.

As you suggest in your blog post, the folk psychological conception of character traits seems to regard them as “robust” in the sense that they regulate behavior in a reliably consistent way, across a range of relevant circumstances. But as I recall from the little bit that we read in Eddy’s seminar (just a couple of papers, including one by Doris), it seems like most of the studies that have been said to support situationism involve the observation of subjects in only a very limited range of circumstances. (One that I remember involved observing whether or not people’s willingness to help a person who’d just dropped a bunch of papers varied on the basis of their having found (or not found) a dime in the coin return slot of a pay phone.) Much of the data seems to consist of mere snapshots of individuals in circumstances that are sometimes quite evocative (e.g., the prison experiment), sometimes only momentary (e.g., the coin slot case), etc.

So I guess my question is this: are there studies that actually involve the observation of a person’s behavior across a wide range of relevant circumstances? I mean, suppose that everyone who really knows Fred considers him to be a reliably compassionate person. But two psychologists who were hiding behind a ficus tree, watching as Fred walked past a poor soul who’d just dropped a bunch of papers, insist that he clearly could not have so robust a character trait. Surely, the people who really know Fred are in a better position than any psychologist hiding behind a ficus tree (or worse, any philosopher sitting in an armchair) to judge the robustness of Fred’s putative traits, right?