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Virtue Cultivation in Light of Situationism

Christian B. Miller

Wake Forest University

millerc@wfu.edu

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.

In the remainder of this paper, I examine the philosophy literature in the hope of finding some promising resources for cultivating the virtues in light of this challenge from situationism. I will end up identifying four distinct strategies, but only one of them, I will argue, holds much promise.

2. From Local to Global Virtues

Recently there has been a fair amount of enthusiasm in the philosophy literature on situationism and virtue cultivation for the following idea – let us assume that people do in fact possess a variety of local virtues, and from there we can then outline strategies whereby those traits can be transformed into more global virtues. What counts as a “local” trait will be indexed to relatively neutral and objective features of situations, such as the office, the bar, and the courtroom.[29] Hence someone might have the local virtue of compassion at home, while simultaneously lacking the local virtue of compassion at the office.

As Nancy Snow writes, “though our virtues might start out by being local, they need not remain so.”[30] Similarly, Edward Slingerland calls the process of extending local virtues, “the central strategy of early Confucian moral education.”[31] So for instance, someone might just have honesty in the classroom, but over time she might be able to broaden that local virtue into a more global, cross-situationally consistent virtue of honesty with respect to all opportunities to cheat.

Now there might be significant philosophical worries concerning just how a local virtue is supposed to be broadened into a global virtue.[32] But I am happy to grant that this part of the story can be made to work. The deeper problem is that there are also good empirical reasons to doubt even the widespread possession of these local virtues. And if those doubts are legitimate, then this strategy will first need to be supplemented with a prior account of how most of us are supposed to acquire the local virtues to begin with. Otherwise the strategy cannot even get off the ground.

Why might we doubt the widespread possession of local virtues? For the same reason that we should doubt that the traditional global virtue are widely held – because of the Surprising Dispositions. As an illustration, let me focus on the moral domain of helping, and also introduce another widely held disposition, namely a desire to help if by helping I can alleviate my negative mood. The role of this desire is well documented by psychologists working on mood and helping.[33] Furthermore, and what is central for my point here, it can significantly motivate helping behavior in a number of different situations.[34] Other things being equal, it does not matter to this desire what the situational properties are, so long as the act of helping is expected to function in this way. So over the course of a given month, for instance, this one desire could (at least partially) motivate helping in a variety of different situations, and in a way that is cross-situationally consistent once its functioning is recognized.

Indeed, once we are aware of such desires and the patterns of helping behavior to which they give rise, psychologists can make predictions about the results of new experiments involving helping tasks that have not yet been studied. For example, I would predict that other things being equal, participants in a moderately negative mood would be more likely to hold the door for someone walking with crutches, or would volunteer to work more hours at a nearby homeless shelter, than would control participants. Such predictions would be made on the assumption that the helping patterns that have been observed in different circumstances in the past would likely continue to be exhibited in the future in these new circumstances, an assumption that seems to involve a commitment to some degree of cross-situational consistency in helping behavior. And this contradicts the starting point of the local virtue approach, which is that helping will be reliable over time in the same situations, but not consistent across situations until a global virtue is developed.

So the widespread possession of local virtues can be doubted on the grounds of their being local. But it can also be doubted on the grounds of there being many people who have these virtues. For when we add this new Surprising Disposition alongside other ones having to do with helping – such as desires to help to maintain a positive mood, to relieve guilt, to avoid embarrassment, to relieve embarrassment, and so forth – then it is hard to see how these dispositions would be compatible with the virtue of compassion even in the office or in the shopping mall. How could someone have such a local virtue of compassion and also be significantly motivated to not help to avoid losing a positive mood or embarrassing oneself?

So it turns out that situationism and our Surprising Dispositions provide a challenge to the cultivation of both global and local virtues.

3. Virtue Cultivation through Virtue Labels

A very different strategy for potentially cultivating the virtues looks to evidence that labeling a person with a traditional trait concept can often have a significant causal impact on her subsequently behaving in accordance with that concept. And repeated virtuous behavior could in the long run lead to the gradual formation of the virtue itself.[35]

The classic experiment in this literature was done by Richard Miller and his colleagues in 1975, who found that fifth graders told that they are ‘tidy,’ subsequently became tidier in their actual classroom behavior than did a control group and a group of children for whom persuasion was used to try to get them to become tidier.[36] In another frequently cited study, Roger Jensen and Shirley Moore found that children who had been labeled using ‘cooperative’ language, placed twice as many blocks in a tower-building game as did children described using ‘competitive’ language, even though many of them in both groups did not remember the earlier attributions.[37] More recently, Gert Cornelissen and his colleagues found that consumers labeled ‘very concerned with the environment and ecologically conscious’[38] with respect to their choice between competing TVs, were subsequently more likely to make environmentally friendly purchasing decisions in comparison to both a control group and a group that received an explicit plea for environmentally conscious consumer purchasing. And this is true, even if environmental impact was not the primary reason for why they had chosen that particular TV.[39]

But for our purposes, the most relevant work on labeling has to do with moral trait labels, and here too similar patterns have been found. In an early study, Robert Kraut asked participants at home during the day to make a donation to the Heart Association. For those who did donate, half were labeled, “You are a generous person. I wish more of the people I met were as charitable as you,” and half were not labeled.[40] For non-donors, half were labeled ‘uncharitable’ and half were not. A week letter, the same participants were asked to donate to a local funding-raising campaign for Multiple Sclerosis. Here were the results:[41]

Average Amount of Donation to MS Research

Donor, Charitable Label $0.70

Donor, No Label $0.41

Non-Donor, Uncharitable Label $0.23

Non-Donor, No Label $0.33

The key point to note is the dramatic difference in donation amount in the first two lines, a difference which seems to have been brought about by the use of a trait label. In another study, Angelo Strenta and William DeJong used the label ‘kind, thoughtful person,’ and when a few minutes later a confederate dropped a stack of 500 computer cards, these labeled participants helped to pick up an average of 163.5 cards and spent 30.1 seconds doing so, compared to 84.4 cards and 21.6 seconds for controls![42]

What accounts for these results? There seems to be some degree of consensus that the new label brings about a change in the person’s self-conception, so that now he thinks of himself as actually having the characteristic disposition in question and his behavior as conforming to that disposition.[43] Furthermore, this change and its subsequent effects need not be operating at the level of conscious awareness – as noted, many participants may not even recall the earlier labeling when they subsequently donated, picked up the cards, or made an environmentally responsible purchase.[44] Finally, it is natural to postulate desires concerned with acting in accordance with the label (at least for positive ones), since the label is publically bestowed, we tend to desire to act in accordance with how we conceive ourselves to be, others will be expecting our future behavior to conform to the label, and we generally want to satisfy other people’s positive expectations of us and continue to be thought highly of by them.[45] Beyond these preliminary observations, though, there does not seem to be a well-developed and widely accepted model on offer yet in the psychology literature to explain the impact of trait labeling on behavior.[46]

What should we make of this strategy for cultivating the virtues? I have two main reactions. First, we have nothing approaching the research data needed to even begin assessing it. For instance, does a virtue label encourage more virtuous behavior only in the short run, or does the effect linger?[47] We do not have longitudinal studies to assess the effects. In addition, even if the effect lingers, what is the nature of the motivation involved in the resulting moral behavior, and do people who have been labeled as compassionate or honest over time come to cultivate the right kinds of motives that are essential to being compassionate or honest? From an Aristotelian perspective, virtuous motivation is necessary for virtue possession, and motives having to do with living up to the perception of others, or continuing to be thought highly of by them, do not count as virtuous. So do people who are labeled as virtuous tend to not just increasingly perform virtuous actions, but also tend to actually become people who realize the virtues?[48]

The second reaction is more principled. Depending on the details of how the strategy is developed, it might lend itself to worries about wrongful deception, unethical manipulation, or violations of moral autonomy. For it might reasonably be thought morally problematic to label someone as, say, an honest person only for the sake of fostering the virtue in him, while knowing full well that he is not an honest person. Of course in some cases (e.g., placebos) we do countenance this deceptive practice, so a detailed discussion is needed here to see whether such a strategy is legitimate on normative grounds, in addition to the empirical concerns already raised.

4. Selecting Our Situations

Here is another approach, one that probably comes to mind right away since it is fairly intuitive. One of the major themes from the situationist literature in psychology is supposed to be that the situations we are in can have a powerful impact on our behavior, either for good (finding a dime) or for ill (being told to continue shocking by an authority). So in order to capitalize on this insight and become better people, the thought is that we should actively seek out those situations which are conducive to morally admirable behavior, while actively avoiding those situations which are conducive to immoral behavior. Hence one might intentionally try to associate with positive role models and surround oneself with actual and fictional examples of virtuous lives. At the same time, to take John Doris’s well-known example, one might actively avoid a secluded dinner with a flirtatious colleague while one’s spouse is out of town.[49]

Indeed, what this proposal can ultimately amount to is the fostering of a virtuous disposition of a certain sort which is meant to lead to behavior that is both cross-situationally consistent in a wide variety of situations and also stable in repeated instances of the same situations. This disposition will be partially constituted by cognitive states involving which situations are conducive to morally admirable behavior and which are not. It will also be partially constituted by motivational states which, other things being equal, will lead to seek and avoidance behavior when encountering the relevant situations.[50]

This strategy is obviously promising in one sense – surely we should self-consciously try to put ourselves in positive situations with morally conducive influences. But it is also a strategy that seems very limited in helping to address the concerns of this paper. For recall some of the environmental variables that were tested in the experiments from section one – finding money, being with someone who is unresponsive, being under an authority figure, leaving the bathroom, and touching something warm. Add to the list other variables from additional studies – such as hot weather, pleasant smells, using hand wipes, being in a room cleaned with Windex, breaking someone’s camera, and so forth.[51] It should be apparent that we are often not even aware of the presence of these environmental variables, or even if we are aware of them, there is little we can do about them. Many of these influences seem downright unavoidable. At least in cases like the flirtatious colleague, the moral dangers should be obvious to most people. But it is asking too much of people to keep track of all the situational influences that could influence their Surprising Dispositions.

There are really two criticism here. One is epistemic – there is just too much information to reasonably expect people to keep track of in trying to implement this strategy. The other criticism is practical – many of these influences are simply unavoidable as we go about our ordinary lives, such as hot weather or loud noises or pleasant smells. Now add to this a third, more fundamental criticism. Even if one were able to avoid the problematic situations, that does not mean that we would have thereby eliminated the underlying Surprising Dispositions. They can continue to exist in a dormant state, just as I might be disposed to believe that 7 * 11 = 77, but not make use of that belief for ten years. So too I might be disposed to desire to cheat in certain ways, even if I successfully avoid situations where I could actually do this. But the continued presence of these Surprising Dispositions, regardless of their frequency of activation, is still enough to disqualify me from being virtuous to any degree. So for these reasons I do not find this third strategy to be very promising, at least as far as virtue cultivation is concerned with respect to the Surprising Dispositions.[52]

There is an interesting variant of this strategy, though. As the psychologist Paul Wachtel noted long ago, situations do not present themselves to us independently of our own impact upon them:

…the understanding of any one person’s behavior in an interpersonal situation solely in terms of the stimuli presented to him gives only a partial and misleading picture. For to a very large extent, these stimuli are created by him. They are responses to his own behavior, events he has played a role in bringing about, rather than occurrences independent of who he is and over which he has no control.[53]

But if this is right, then we can play an active role in creating which situations to be in, at least to some extent, by choosing how we are going to shape our environment through both our obvious and subtle behaviors. As Hagop Sarkissian writes, “influencing how situations unfold begins with minding the cues arising from one’s person.”[54] So mindfully selecting morally positive cues might help call forth positive responses in others, which in turn can be reflected back on ourselves, leading to their joint reinforcement.[55]

I do not know of any studies which have tested these claims about specifically moral reinforcement, but they certainly seem worth conducting.[56] For now we have to be agnostic about this approach until the empirical results come in. Even still, though, while it might be one piece in a larger story about virtue cultivation, it is not a strategy that has much to say about the Surprising Dispositions themselves. So I will put it to one side in this paper.[57]

5. Getting the Word Out

If there are a number of psychological dispositions which (i) often operate unconsciously or outside our conscious awareness, (ii) have important implications for moral behavior, and (iii) can prevent that behavior from having moral worth or can even lead to the performance of morally forbidden actions, then a natural strategy to use in trying to become a more virtuous person is to first become better aware of and familiar with these processes. Once we recognize their presence, the thought is that we can then be more mindful when in situations in which they might be activated, and work to compensate for, correct, or counterbalance them.[58] As Aristotle himself noted long ago, “We must also examine what we ourselves drift into easily. For different people have different natural tendencies toward different goals, and we shall come to know our own tendencies from the pleasure or pain that arises in us. We must drag ourselves off in the contrary direction; for if we pull far away from error, as they do in straightening bent wood, we shall reach the intermediate condition.”[59] To take an example of how this might go in practice, if we become aware of the processes responsible for the group effect on helping, for instance, we might become more alert to the negative moral effect that non-responding others can have in emergency situations, and so try to focus more on our conscious moral values and less on the fear, say, of what others might think if we tried to help.[60]

The hope, then, is that education about the work of our morally relevant unconscious dispositions can help correct for their operation when they lead us in problematic directions. A small group of studies seems to offer a glimmer of hope for this possibility. In two studies Arthur Beaman and his colleagues had college students hear a social psychology lecture explaining the Latané and Darley model of group effects. They were subsequently presented with a staged emergency – a victim of a bicycle accident in the one case, and a man sprawled against a wall in the other. Helping in the presence of a nonresponsive confederate was 67% versus 27% for controls in the first study, and 42.5% versus 25% in the second (even though in this study the helping opportunity was two weeks later than the lecture).[61] In a less rigorous study, Steven Samuels and William Casebeer contacted students from a social psychology class up to two years later, and for the question, “Did learning about helping behaviour lead you to help in any situation in which you believe you would not have otherwise helped?”, 72% answered positively.[62]

Perhaps the most serious challenge from the experimental literature to the proposal comes from Pietromonaco and Nisbett’s 1982 study using the Darley and Batson (1973) seminary results. Even though they had just read how hurry is a significant situational variable that led to differences in helping of 10% versus 63%, participants in the Pietromonaco and Nisbett study still estimated that 59% of people in a hurry would stop to help in two closely related situations, while 78% of people who are not in a hurry would stop.[63] As Pietromonaco and Nisbett note, “In view of the perseverance of this error, we cannot assume that students are learning what we want them to learn when evidence presented in class conflicts with their prior assumptions. Social psychologists may face almost unique educational problems: prior beliefs about such subject matter are so strong that ordinary instructional techniques may not be adequate.”[64] However, their study did not involve actually educating the participants about the psychological processes which could explain the Darley and Batson data. As they note, such a thorough ‘process debriefing’ may be more effective.[65]

Unlike the previous strategy, then, the goal here with this educational strategy is not to try to avoid all the potentially problematic situational influences in life, which would quickly lead to frustration and failure. Rather the goal is to be aware when we are already in those situations, and be more mindful of how we subsequently behave as a result. So when you hear what sounds like an emergency, even though you are with an unresponsive bystander, you might know to discount the bystander and be more careful to check on the person in apparent need. Or when someone drops papers and you do not immediately respond by helping, you could ask yourself whether you had a good reason for not doing so, or perhaps were being influenced by something non-virtuous below your level of awareness. The next time you see someone drop papers, you could then remember this earlier incident and quickly respond by helping, thereby starting a process of gradually counteracting the unconscious influences which were leading you to not help. Or to take one final and more significant example, if an authority figure pressures you to do something which goes against your moral code, you might be reminded of results like Milgram’s and self-consciously assess the justification for obeying in this context.

Thus far, the “Getting the Word Out” strategy has focused on taking steps to block our Surprising Dispositions from leading us to perform morally wrong actions, such as shocking an innocent person to death or doing nothing while someone seems to need emergency assistance in the next room. But our Surprising Dispositions can also lead to either morally obligatory or supererogatory actions in particular cases. The drawback, though, is that when this happens, the actions will often be caused by motives which are not morally admirable. Here, for instance, was one of the examples of our Surprising Dispositions from section one:

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.

When such a disposition gives rise to helping, that could be an exemplary action considered in its own right, but if it was primarily motivated in this egoistic way, then it is also an action which has no moral worth.

The question then becomes how this strategy would not only combat the effects of Surprising Dispositions in leading to morally wrong behavior, but also the effects of such dispositions in leading to morally admirable actions with morally problematic motives.[66] And the answer, it seems to me, would again have to involve educating people about the pervasive presence and influence of dispositions like the desire to help for the particular egoistic reasons in this example, and providing us with some account of how morally admirable motives can instead take their place. For instance, perhaps when a person recognizes that she is in a situation which is likely going to trigger a desire to help for egoistic reasons, she can self-consciously put herself into an altruistic mindset by actively empathizing with the person in need in the situation.[67]

Stepping back from these details, what should we make about this general strategy for virtue cultivation in light of situationism? In theory this strategy sounds promising to me – more promising, in fact, than any of the other strategies outlined in this paper for addressing the challenge to virtue cultivation posed by our Surprising Dispositions. But let me end with two cautionary notes. First, as we saw above, the amount of experimental evidence that can be cited in support of this approach is noticeably (and surprisingly) scarce. Far more work needs to be done in studying how successful it might be for a wide variety of dispositions and their effects in lots of different circumstances.[68]

And then there is a second worry, a variant of which we have already noted in the previous section. It is the worry that this strategy may be asking too much of what can reasonably be expected of ordinary human beings. For in order to implement this strategy properly with respect to all the moral domains of life – helping, harming, lying, cheating, stealing, and so forth – and in order to cultivate all of the virtues – compassion, non-malevolence, honesty, fairness, temperance, and so forth – it seems that a person would have to keep track of an enormous amount of information. First she would need to be educated about the existence and influence of dozens and dozens of unconscious Surprising Dispositions. Then secondly she would need to be mindful enough to check to see whether, when behaving a certain way, she might be influenced by one of them in a morally problematic respect. So the information needs to be stored, and then it needs to be available for recall and application in real-life situations. And this all needs to be done quickly enough before the moment – the emergency, the dropped papers, the opportunity to stand up for the right thing – passes by.

Here is a possible response to this worry. The advocate of this educational strategy should simply concede that there will be practical difficulties in the short run, but insist that over time this process of self-monitoring can become routine and habitual. At first I might not help someone, and only when it is too late recognize that fear of embarrassment was holding me back. The next time when a similar opportunity arises, I might find myself again inclined not to do anything, but this time I check my feeling of aversion and wonder whether it has any legitimate basis. Concluding that it does not, I consciously will myself to help in this case. Over time, the opposition to helping might go away entirely and helping in this situation becomes more automatic. Of course a lot of details would have to be filled in, but perhaps there is something promising to be said along these lines.

At this point I am left wondering about the following questions:

First, will the experimental evidence support this educational strategy, since right now we have hardly any evidence with which to test it?

Secondly, is it too much to expect of ordinary folks who lead busy lives to learn this much information about themselves and their psychological lives, and then habitually keep track of it on a daily basis in order to acquire the moral virtues?

And third and most speculatively, what would the quality of our lives be like if we had to regularly self-monitor our behavior and guard again the possible negative influence of our many unconscious dispositions?

5. A Final Note

It is unlikely that there will only be one promising strategy for cultivating the virtues in light of our Surprising Dispositions, just as it is unlikely that the above strategies will have nothing promising to offer in this area. Rather, a multi-faceted approach emphasizing the importance of education, selecting situations, fostering local virtues, and (judiciously) using virtue labels may be needed, along with an emphasis on positive role models, secure family attachments, and a morally up-building school and community environment. Developing such a sophisticated approach to virtue cultivation is precisely the project that I hope will be taken up in future discussions of situationism in both philosophy and psychology.

Suppose such an approach can be worked out in detail. There is another crucial issue which still remains and which has not even been touched in this paper.[69] It is the issue about motivating people to embark on the path of virtue cultivation in the first place. Yes, perhaps we can get people to understand themselves a lot better and learn about their Surprising Dispositions. And yes, perhaps we can develop a multi-faceted approach to transforming these dispositions slowly over time into virtuous dispositions. But no one is going to bother with this endeavor without being significant motivated to do so. So how do we get people to care enough about becoming more virtuous, and derivatively to care about using these strategies as a means to doing so, in a way that is sufficiently strong and long-lasting to see the project through to completion? This question is extremely pressing and remains unanswered.[70]

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[1] For similar remarks, see Bowers 1973: 308-309.

[2] For extensive references to the use of these labels in the literature, see Miller 2014: chapter four.

[3] See Miller 2014: chapter four.

[4] Hence Skinner: “Every discovery of an event which has a part in shaping a man’s behavior seems to leave so much the less to be credited to the man himself; and as such explanations become more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero” (1955-56: 52). See also the relevant discussion in Flanagan 1991: 264 and Funder 2007: 107.

[5] See, among many others, Bowers 1973: 307-311, 315-316, 319, 326, 328, Funder and Ozer 1983, Ross and Nisbett 1991: xiv, and Funder 2007: 101, 112, 117.

[6] Much more could be said about these points than I have done so here, but fortunately the discussion in the psychology literature is extensive. See, e.g., Mischel 1968: 298-299, Wachtel 1973: 330, Bowers 1973: 329, and Ross and Nisbett 1991: 19, 154-156,.

[7] Walter Mischel puts the point well when he writes that, “we may predict best if we know what each situation means to the individual, and consider the interaction of the person and the setting, rather than concentrating either on the situation itself or on the individual in an environmental and social vacuum” (1971: 149).

For additional concerns about (a) and (b), see Miller 2014: chapter four.

[8] See, among many others, Bowers 1973: 319-333, Mischel 1971: 149, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 257, 260, Nelkin 2005: 182 fn. 5, and Flanagan 2009: 64. For a thorough and technical critique, see Shoda 1999b.

[9] Funder and Ozer 1983: 110.

[10] Ibid., 111.

[11] For broadly similar sentiments, see Ross and Nisbett 1991: 46, Flanagan 1991: 292, Doris 2002: 63 fn. 5, Vranas 2005: 3, Nahmias 2007: 4, and D. Russell 2009: 253, 277.

[12] See, e.g., Baumeister et al. 1996.

[13] See, e.g., Milgram 1974. As Milgram wrote in an earlier paper, “The person brings to the laboratory enduring dispositions toward authority and aggression…” (1965: 274).

[14] See, e.g., Carlson et al. 1988.

[15] See, e.g., Latané and Darley 1970.

[16] See, e.g., Mazar et al. 2008.

[17] Latané and Darley 1970: 124.

[18] Isen and Levin 1972. For more on some of the replication troubles that arose, as well as other mood effect studies, see Miller 2013a: chapter three.

[19] Latané and Rodin 1969: 193-195, Latané and Darley 1970: 60-63.

[20] Milgram 1974: 60.

[21] Cann and Blackwelder 1984: 224.

[22] The rewards were a Snapple beverage or a $1 gift certificate for a local ice cream shop, but the results did not vary significantly between the two (Williams and Bargh 2008: 607).

[23] Ibid.

[24] It is important to keep the studies themselves separate from the claims made by situationists in both psychology and philosophy. For instance, some critics have questioned the methodologies used in particular studies, and there have been some replication worries as well. Furthermore, even trusting the studies themselves, various attempts have been made to show how, for instance, they might still be compatible with the widespread possession of the broad traits which situationists in psychology reject. Fortunately we do not need to consider these issues here.

For a discussion of the various responses made to situationists in psychology and philosophy, see Miller 2014: chapters four and eight.

[25] See in particular Miller 2013: chapters two through six, nine, ten and 2014: chapter three.

[26] See Miller 2013, 2014: chapter three. Note that it does not follow that they are constituents of moral vices either. In the same discussion, I also argue against this interpretation as well. For related discussion, see also L. Russell 2009.

[27] See Harman 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2009, Doris 1998, 2002, 2010, and Merritt et al. 2010. While we all agree on this conclusion, Harman and Doris may not endorse the particular route I have taken in my own work to get there. For extensive discussion of their work, see Miller 2014: chapter eight.

[28] For a discussion of all these options and reasons to adopt the Mixed Trait approach, see Miller 2013, 2014.

[29] This is meant to signal that local traits are not to be individuated on the grounds of what is psychologically salient to the person in question, grounds which could cut across a variety of more objectively describable situations. Here I am making use of the distinction between psychologically salient and nominal features of situations, a distinction which is commonplace in the psychology literature. See, e.g., Shoda et al. 1994.

[30] Snow 2010: 37. See her discussion of the strategy on pages 31-38 as well as Adams 2006: 127-129, chapter twelve.

[31] Slingerland 2011: 406.

[32] See in particular Rachana Kamtekar’s unpublished paper, “Becoming Good: Narrow Dispositions and the Stability of Virtue.”

[33] For discussion of the psychological research, see Miller 2013: chapter six.

[34] Footnote 29 is important to stress again – these are different situations as individuated nominally and not on the grounds of what is psychologically salient to the person.

[35] Of course the phenomenon works both ways – labeling someone with a vice concept can promote more vicious behavior (for relevant discussion, see Kraut 1973 and Strenta and DeJong 1981: 146).

[36] Miller et al. 1975.

[37] Jensen and Moore 1977.

[38] Cornelissen et al. 2007: 281.

[39] As they write, “The label invites a consumer who engaged in a pro-environmental act for an alternative motivation – like financial concerns or the preference for another intrinsic product quality – to re-attribute that behavior to their value of caring for the environment” (Cornelissen et al. 2007: 280). For qualifications and further details, see Cornelissen et al. 2006, 2007. For additional studies on activated trait constructs and increased relevant behavior, see Bargh et al. 2001: 1019.

[40] Kraut 1973: 554.

[41] Ibid., 556.

[42] Strenta and DeJong 1981: 145. For additional studies using moral trait labels, see Grusec, Kuczynski, et al. 1978, Grusec and Redler 1980, and Mills and Grusec 1989. For a related study in which teachers were told by a third party that certain students were ‘late bloomers’ and so were thereby labeled indirectly, see Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968. It turned out that these students in turn performed better than controls, even though (unbeknownst to the teacher) the assignment of the students to this category was perfectly random.

[43] For relevant discussion, qualifications, and elaboration, see Kraut 1973: 552, 559, Jensen and Moore 1977: 307, Grusec and Redler 1980: 525-526, 529, Strenta and Dejong 1981: 142-143, 146, Mills and Grusec 1989: 300-301, Lapsley 1996: 172-174, and Cornelissen et al. 2007: 279. For self-perception theory more generally, see Bem 1972. For discussion of the variables which can moderate this effect, see Cornelissen et al. 2007: 279-280 and Alfano unpublished.

Note that in the case of the Kraut study above, a competing explanation could be, not that the participants believed that they were generous, but rather that they believed others thought that they were generous and they wanted to live up to this label in the future. Thanks to Eranda Jayawickreme for pointing this out to me.

[44] As Jensen and Moore write about their study of children and the tower-building game, “one would have to suspect that the behavioral dispositions displayed by the boys were not mediated by conscious changes in self-perception following attribution. Other mechanisms must be considered” (1977: 307).

[45] For relevant discussion, see Mischel 1968: 284, Jensen and Moore 1977: 307, and Cornelissen et al. 2007: 279.

[46] As a leading contributor to this literature, Joan Grusec, writes, “Subjects who are told that they are the kind of people who like to help whenever they can may infer that prosocial behaviors across a variety of situations are expected of them…The mechanism whereby attributional statements function, then, is not yet clear. That such statements are effective, however, is evident” (Grusec and Redler 1980: 533). For additional discussion, see Mischel 1968: 230, 284-287, Grusec and Redler 1980, Mills and Grusec 1989, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 228-230, Lapsley 1996: 171-174, Henderlong and Lepper 2002: 781-782, Doris 2002: 126, Kamtekar 2004: 490, Cornelissen et al. 2007: 279-280, Upton 2009: 61-62, Prinz 2009: 127-128, and especially Alfano 2013, which discusses the literature on trait labeling and issues related to the preservationist option in detail.

[47] For studies which found the effects lasted at least one to two weeks, see Kraut 1973 and Grusec and Redler 1980. For speculation that the effects may only be short-lived, see Strenta and DeJong 1981: 146.

[48] For a negative answer, although without any empirical evidence, see Alfano 2013.

[49] Doris 2002: 147. For elaboration of this strategy, although not necessarily in the service of cultivating the virtues, see Mischel and Shoda 1995: 261, Doris 1998: 517, 2002, Merritt 2000, Harman 2003: 91, Funder 2008: 575, Sosa 2009: 288, D. Russell 2009: 327, Merritt et al. 2010: 389-391, and Slingerland 2011: 414-415.

[50] Thanks to Erik Helzer and Eranda Jayawickreme for helpful discussion here.

[51] For these specific influences, see Miller 2013: chapters two through six.

[52] For additional criticism of this strategy, see Sabini and Silver 2005: 561 and Sarkissian 2010: 5.

[53] Wachtel 1973: 330, emphasis removed. See also Bowers 1973: 329 and Funder 2008: 575.

[54] Sarkissian 2010: 9. See pages 6-12 for development of this idea.

[55] As Sarkissian writes, “We hardly notice it, but oftentimes a kind smile from a friend, a playful wink from a stranger, or a meaningful handshake from a supportive colleague can completely change our attitudes. Such minor acts can have great effects. If we mind them, we can foster a form of ethical bootstrapping – that is, we can prompt or lift one another toward our joint moral ends” (2010: 12, emphasis his). Of course while this might promote moral action, it is much less clear that it can help promote moral virtue. For instance, in these examples our mood might be elevated, and positive moods often do not promote helping done for morally admirable reasons.

[56] The broader claim about transmission of emotions is, on the other hand, well known.

[57] Still another version of the “Selecting Situations” strategy would involve the selection being done, not in the first instance by the agent in question, but rather by careful manipulations of the environment by his or her community or society. The recent literature on nudging is relevant here. See, e.g., Thaler and Sunstein 2009.

[58] As Steven Samuels and William Casebeer argue, “effective deliberation is enhanced by knowing both how human beings tend to react in certain environments and what stimuli reliably activate those dispositions…Once they are able to see what environmental factors have the potential to influence, they may be better prepared to make a decision based on their true beliefs and feelings” (2005: 77). Similarly Mischel and Shoda claim that, “metacognitive knowledge may help the person to recognize some of the key internal or external stimuli that activate or deactivate the problematic affects, cognitions, and behaviors and the dynamics that occur in relation to those stimuli” (1995: 261). See also Sabini and Silver 2006: 562, Appiah 2008: 49, Badhwar 2009: 266, Merritt et al. 2010: 388-389, van IJzendoorn et al. 2010: 16, and especially Mele and Shepherd 2013.

[59] Aristotle 1985: 1109b2-8.

[60] For a similar example, see Mele and Shepherd 2013: 80.

[61] Beaman et al. 1978: 407-408, 410.

[62] Samuels and Casebeer 2005: 80. It is worth noting, though, that even trained psychiatrists badly underestimated rates of disobedience in the standard Milgram setup (Milgram 1974: 30-31), and Bierbrauer found that observance of a re-enactment of full compliance with the experimenter in Milgram’s experiment five still led participants to greatly overestimate levels of disobedience (1979). So this might raise some doubt about the effectiveness of the educational strategy. However, note that in neither case had the participants been educated about the psychological processes at work in disposing people to obey seemingly legitimate authority figures. So these studies do not exactly bear on the proposal above.

See also Kunda and Nisbett 1986, who found that trained psychologists still badly overestimated the correlations between one person being more honest than another in one situation, and the same relation obtaining in the next situation. And this was the case even despite Walter Mischel, “seated prominently in front of the room!” (1986: 210). Yet they concluded that, “it would be premature to be pessimistic about the possibility that training might improve people’s ability…” (222), and offered some suggestions for improvement (221-222).

For relevant discussion, see also Doris 2002: 99-100.

[63] Pietromonaco and Nisbett 1982: 3.

[64] Ibid., 4.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Thanks to Erik Helzer for helpful discussion here.

[67] For the relationship between empathy and altruistic motivation, see Batson 2011.

[68] For related discussion of this strategy, see Staub 1974: 337, Flanagan 1991: 314, Arjoon 2008: 232, Merritt et al. 2010: 388-389, and especially Samuels and Casebeer 2005. For more general discussion of ethics instruction and improved moral behavior especially with respect to cheating, see Bloodgood et al. 2008 and the references cited therein.

[69] Thanks to William Fleeson for discussion here.

[70] I am very grateful to the conference organizers for inviting me to contribute, and to Erik Helzer, Mike Furr, William Fleeson, Eranda Jayawickreme, and Heidi Giannini for helpful comments on a previous draft. The material in this paper draws on a few paragraphs from Miller 2014: chapters four, eight, and nine. Support for working on this paper was funded in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The opinions expressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of these Templeton Foundations.

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