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Applied Ethics · Chapter 5

The Situation Engine

Virtue ethics needs character traits to be real, consistent and stable. From the 1960s, social psychology suggested they might be none of those things. Here you set the situation and the person on separate dials and watch twenty people decide. The uncomfortable finding is not that the person dial does nothing — it is how little it does compared with the others.

1 · Choose the moment

What the actual studies found

And the coefficient behind all of it
Walter Mischel’s 1968 review found that personality-trait measures typically correlate with behaviour at around r = 0.3 — the so-called personality coefficient. The honest student is not reliably honest across settings; she is honest in the settings where honesty is cued and cheap.

2 · Twenty people, one situation

0%

3 · What actually moved the needle

4 · Say it the interactionist way

Mischel and Yuichi Shoda’s CAPS model (1995) says people have stable if…then signatures rather than context-free labels. Traits are real; they are indexed to conditions. Most philosophers now work with something like this.

Four replies to the situationist