Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior

by John M. Doris

This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethics and moral psychology, challenging fundamental assumptions about character dating to Aristotle. John Doris draws on an array of social scientific research, especially experimental social psychology, to argue that people often grossly overestimate the behavioral impact of character and grossly underestimate the behaviorial impact of situations. Circumstance, Doris concludes, often has extraordinary influence on what people do, whatever sort of character they may appear to have. He then considers the implications of this observation for a range of issues in ethics, arguing that with more realistic picture effect, cognition, and motivation, moral psychology can support more compelling ethical theories and more humane ethical practices.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2002

Reviews

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 3 out of 5]

This week was my first ever teaching experience – as a teaching assistant, I led a discussion group of 24 students on this week’s theme of the course: moral character and situationism. For the situationist argument, we read sections of Doris’ book.

Doris uses the results of social psychological experiments to argue against the notion of that there is something like a fixed character, with broad, global traits. The results from countless experiments demonstrate not only the power of the situation in determining human behavior but the disproportionally large effect that morally irrelevant situational factors have on our moral behavior. For instance, experiments by Isen and Levin show that finding a dime in a phone booth (vs. not finding a dime) greatly influences how likely people are to help someone pick up a dropped folder, with those finding the dime being much more likely to help. If such a small thing like finding a dime can affect our moral behavior – like helping someone gather their fallen belongings – then what does this say about character? According to Doris, it means at least that we do not have particularly strong and stable characters. Furthermore, on the destructive side of human behavior, the experiments by Milgram and Zimbardo reveal that relatively normal and good people can behave atrociously in certain situations. Again, character – or personality – does not seem to explain much of what we do; the situation is the more pertinent and powerful factor in moral behavior.

Against the situationist view, we considered two recent criticisms by Kleingeld. First, that below the inconsistency in declared versus observed behavior (in the Milgram experiment, for instance, between good people who would not hurt another person versus what they actually end up doing) may lie some trait, like egoism, which is not consistently associated with observable good/bad behavior. She offers the example of the egoistic politician, who is beneficent in front of cameras but not when no one observes her. The situationist can only explain this scenario according to the situational factors of camera versus no-camera; while, in fact, there is (so argues Kleinberg) a stable underlying trait at work, namely egoism. The second criticism is related to the ethico-political agenda of the situationist, who advocate situation management as opposed to the traditional building of character or a virtuous personality. The criticism regards a paradox in the situationist position: in order to manage one’s situations, one has to assume a sort of person who cares about the outcomes of their actions and seeks to consistently manage situations, et cetera – which comes very close to assuming a kind of person, that is, a person with a certain character or at least someone who has reasons for acting as opposed to being merely at the mercy of situations.

Kleingeld does not deny the power of the situation. The body of social psychological research does not allow this, I think. But the interpretation of the studies is of course still open for debate; and the position of Doris – that there is no such thing as character – is probably overstated.

[Ava · Rating 1 out of 5]

The swagger of the iconoclast is tolerable when there are solid arguments behind it; in this case, while there are some genuinely interesting points, you have to sift through a great deal of confusion to get to them.

Doris often seems to think he's attacking the notion of character itself -- which leads him to a lot of self-important rhetoric about the need to abandon something he calls "characterological ethics" -- but when he starts discussing actual data, he seems to abandon those arguments, claiming instead that character should be understood in terms of "local traits." This local-traits argument seems perfectly plausible, and in fact a significant contribution to virtue ethics. But Doris seems not to know what arguments he's making. Instead of assessing the implications of a local-traits model of character for virtue ethics, he keeps returning to the odd claim that "characterological ethics" should be abandoned altogether. This is, perhaps, support for his ultimate contention that people aren't as consistent as they think they are. But it makes for frustrating reading.

[Bluebell · Rating 3 out of 5]

An informative book with lots of citations of the psychological studies. The author apparently read a lot of relevant empirical work. However, the arguments lack sufficient rigor and the claims made often seem stronger than what can be supported by cited evidence.

[Will S · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to clarify a common misunderstanding about the argument in this really excellent book: Doris does NOT claim that there is no such thing as character traits. He over and over says that there ARE character traits, and can confirm from speaking with him that he has never thought there are no character traits (as opposed to say, Gilbert Harman, who made similar arguments around the same time and did think the empirical literature showed there are no character traits). Doris believes the following about character traits: "I allow for the possibility of temporally stable, situation-particular, "local" traits that are associated with the important individual differences in behavior. As I understand things, these local traits are likely to be extremely fine-grained; a person might be repeatedly helpful in iterated trials of the same situation..." (pg 25).

What Doris argues against is that these "local" traits can sustain the usual picture of human behavior implied when we describe someone as "introverted" or "honest". The use of traits in the way we typically do presupposes a "globalist" conception of character traits, which implies that traits are "robust," situation-insensitive character traits which are consistently elicited under relevant conditions. Doris argues the empirical evidence from psychology overwhelming shows that the vast majority of people (he admits evidence indicates there are rare exceptions, pg 60) do not exhibit these robust character traits such that virtue ethics and talk of someone's "character" makes much sense. What matters far more for determining our behavior is the situational context we find ourselves in and the complex, multifarious effects it has on our behavior. It is in my view the one real weakness of the book that what constitutes a "situation" is never adequately explained, and different experiments and real-life examples seem to entail different scopes to the relevant situation at hand. I worry about the possibility of confirmation bias here-we just adjust the scope of the situation to find the behavioral 'context' to explain our actions. If the situationist allows too expansive a scope for a candidate situation, we risk making trivial claims about the influence of our environment on behavior.

The first half of the book (Especially chapters 2-4) lays out the philosophical groundwork for virtue ethics' psychological commitments and then presents the empirical evidence that seems to disprove the possibility of virtue ethics' picture of human psychology. The second half attempts to make sense of the ethical wreckage in the wake of Doris' bombshell that our environment affects our behavior far more pervasively than we intuitively think. His goal is a self-described philosophical conservativism: saving as many of the concepts central to our ethical lives as possible by adapting their core features to a "situationist" picture of character (pg 108). I thought these chapters (6-8) were overall really excellent, but I badly wanted some discussion of implications for political philosophy as well. The situationist picture of the human beings makes for some really interesting potential discussions about, for example, debates between liberalism and its rivals like Marxism and communitarianism. Both of the latter two ideologies criticize liberalism for focusing too much on individual agency and not enough to the material and cultural conditions in which people make those decisions. Does situationism lend empirical support to this shared concern that there is something importantly wrong with the traditional picture of social action within Liberal political philosophy (or, more conciliatory, that liberalism's value lies in different places than liberals tend to believe)? I do not know, and unfortunately Doris does not broach the topic. I am being unreasonably demanding in complaining about this omission because I found his discussions of the ethical issues at hand subtle and thoughtful, and would rather hear his thoughts on those issues, rather than try to extrapolate implications out on my own. I do not know a better compliment to book than that.

[Chris Meyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virtue ethics, the ethical theory of Aristotle, has experienced a revival over the last 50 years and has become a major contender in contemporary moral philosophy. John Doris, however, argues that virtue ethics is inconsistent with facts about human psychology. He points to experiments in social psychology that support situationism—the view that much of what we do is determined not by what kind of people we are but by the situation we are in. For example, one experiment tested whether unwitting subjects exiting a phone booth would help a stranger who dropped a stack of papers. For some subjects, a dime was planted in the phone booth. Those who found the dime helped 88% of the time; those who did not find a dime helped only 4% of the time. Thus, whether you help has little to do with what kind of person you are and is mostly influenced by trivial features of the situation.

Situationism seems to imply that the robust character traits required for virtue ethics do not exist. Virtue ethics is guilty of committing the “fundamental attribution error”: overestimating character traits as influencing behavior and underestimating situational factors. Furthermore, virtue ethics is unhelpful as a normative theory because it give us advice that most of us cannot act on and encourages us to cultivate and rely on character traits that we cannot acquire and are not reliable. Doris argues, rather convincingly, that we would do better morally to try to control our situation that to try to mold our character.

Doris might be faulted for giving the misleading impression that situationism is uncontroversially accepted as fact in social psychology. Nevertheless, his argument against virtue ethics is devastating. And the book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in contemporary moral philosophy.

[lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was recommended by the ethicist of the new york times when i went to one of his lectures... good. very involved and more like a text book than anything, but supremely interesting.

[CR · Rating 4 out of 5]

On all accounts, an excellent work of research. Highly recommended to anybody interested in personality psychology and the ethics of character.