Situationism 1. Situationism: Let s return to the issue of moral luck, with which we started. Situationism is a thesis of psychology that deals with something like what we called circumstantial luck (this was the idea that what circumstances, or situations, you find yourself in are outside of your control). We should all admit that many situational factors are outside of our control such as how tired or stressed we are, how much of a hurry we re in, whether we re in a good mood or a bad mood, whether someone is watching us or not, and so on can strongly affect how we act. But, more and more, psychologists are claiming to have evidence that such factors are a lot more common and influential than we might have thought. Consider a few of the famous experiments that kicked things off: (a) Obedience to Authority (The Milgram Experiment, 1963) Participants are assigned the role of teacher and told to ask questions of a student in another room via intercom, which are answered by pressing a button (they did not know that the student was actually an actor). Teachers are then instructed to administer shocks to the student for wrong answers, with the voltage increasing each time. The 30 levels of shocks ranged from very small to danger: severe shock and then XXX, a fatal 450 volts. The students complained after the first shocks, and later began screaming, and finally went silent after the 20 th shock. If teachers expressed doubt, hesitation, etc., someone in a white lab coat would encourage them to please continue. Results: 26 of 40 teachers continued all the way to the 30 th shock. All 40 administered at least the 20 th shock (300 volts). Other versions: Student s answers could be heard via intercom: 25 of 40 continued to end. Student was in same room 1.5 feet away: 16 of 40 continued to end. Teacher had to physically hold student s hand to the shock plate before administering shocks: 12 of 40 continued to end. (b) The Bystander Effect (Darley and Latane, 1968) Participants were placed in a room alone, and told that they would be interacting with one or more participants in another room via intercom. Group A was told that there was only one person in the other room, Group B two others, and Group C five others. What they actually heard over the intercom was a two minute recording of someone saying that they were going to have a seizure, then talking incoherently, and then choking and going silent. The number of participants who left to go help before the two minutes were over were A: 85%, B: 62%, C: 31%. 1
(c) The Effects of One s Role (Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971) Participants were divided into two groups, guards and prisoners, in order to interact in a mock-prison setting. Prisoners were arrested in their homes, booked, and given numbers for names. Guards were given uniforms and night sticks and told to keep the prisoners in line. The study, which was designed to last two weeks, was cut short after only six days after many of the prisoners suffered severe depression and anxiety, and many of the guards began psychologically and physically terrorizing the prisoners. 2. Interpreting the Results: In light of the above, it seems that, in the right circumstances, ordinary everyday people are capable of failing to aid an innocent dying person, of psychologically and physically abusing innocent people, and even murdering innocent people. Some of these right circumstances can include things like: (a) Obedience to Authority: People are more likely to do bad deeds if they are instructed to do so by a figure of authority. This is because they tend to displace the responsibility onto the order-giver, rather than feeling responsible for their own actions. (b) The Bystander Effect: People are less likely to come to someone s aid if there are other people present. This is because the presence of others diffuses one s sense of responsibility, due to thinking (sometimes incorrectly) things like, surely someone else will help or that person is in a better position to help than I am. (c) The Effect of One s Role: People are more likely to act in certain ways if they feel that it fits the role that one finds him/herself in. This is because there is a (perhaps socialized) tendency to conform, or want to fit in, or fit expectations. Note that some experiments seem to show that people are more likely to do GOOD deeds when influenced by their situation as well. For instance: (d) The Honesty Box (Bateman, 2006): In this study, an honesty box was placed beside coffee, tea, and milk that were set out for office workers. Above the box was a sheet with suggested money contributions for each item. Each week, a design on the sheet alternated between an image of a flower, and an image of a pair of eyes (over the course of 10 weeks). Experimenters found that workers contributed, on average, 2.76 times more money during weeks when the sheet had a pair of eyes on it. Results: People were much more likely to pay (or pay more) for items when the eyes were present, supposedly because it subconsciously activated the sensation that someone was watching. 2
(e) The Phone Booth Experiment (Isen & Levin, 1972): In this famous experiment (not mentioned in the assigned reading), experimenters observed people going into phone booths in shopping malls. Some of them found a dime in the change slot before making a call, while others did not. After exiting the booth, an actor accidentally drops a folder full of papers. Number of people who stopped to help pick up the papers: Found a dime, 89%; Didn t find a dime, 4%. Results: Finding a dime made people FAR more likely to help someone in need (perhaps because it put them in a good mood, or because they felt like they had just been helped by the world, etc.). But, such information can be spun either pessimistically or optimistically. 3. The Pessimistic Interpretation: A couple of issues that we ve dealt with arise here: (1) The ability to do otherwise: It seems that the nature of the situation that you are in can influence how you behave. But, do such situations do more than merely influence, but actually COMPEL people to act in certain ways? For instance, Stanley Milgram thought that his participants could not bring themselves to make an open break with authority. If so, this is a threat to freedom. (2) Moral luck: Even if the situation is not COMPELLING of behavior, it does seem to at least indicate that factors that are both unknown to us and outside of our control can make us more LIKELY to behave in certain ways. But, then, in at least some situations, whether we do a good or bad deed seems to just be a case of moral luck. You probably claim to be a good person, and are generally good. Even so, it may be the case that you would actually do morally terrible things if put in certain situations (especially if we imagine further that you had been raised differently, from birth). So, the fact that you HAVEN T done morally terrible things (I hope) is, in some sense, just a matter of luck. You re LUCKY that you weren t raised in a certain way, and haven t found yourself in the sort of situation where you would (be compelled to? Be strongly tempted to?) act wrongly. If so, this is a threat to praise and blame. Why should someone be praised for helping a stranger, if it was just the lucky result of having found a dime moments before? Why should the guards in the Stanford experiment be blamed for being bad, if it was just the result of being unlucky enough to sign up for an experiment that would elicit such terrible behavior? 3
The result is a view called Situationism : Situationism: Human behavior is largely driven by the situations in which people find themselves. A pessimistic spin on this thesis states that Situationism is a threat to freedom and moral responsibility. It may seem that we are not in control at all, but are merely products of our circumstances, acting for reasons that are unknown to us and outside of our control, such that praise and blame are seldom (never?) justified. Situationism and the Nazis: Many of these original experiments came at a very interesting time in history, when many Nazis were standing trial for their war crimes. Could it possibly be the case that some who committed such awful deeds were merely victims of circumstantial luck (or, rather, unluck )? For instance, Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi lieutenant colonel who oversaw many of the atrocities of World War II, wrote just a few days before he was executed in 1962 for his crimes, I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty. There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders. He pleaded that his accusers were not able to empathize with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years. We condemn Eichmann for being a moral monster, and confidently claim that WE would never have acted so despicably, were we in his shoes. But, HOW confident of this are we? It may be worth asking this terrible question about ourselves: Imagine that you were born in Germany in the 1920 s. Can you be absolutely SURE that you would not have committed some terrible deed, had you grown up in exactly the same situation as one of the Nazis? If pessimistic situationism is true, then we can t be sure. 4. The Optimistic Interpretation: Mele and Shepherd are more optimistic. While they admit that many situational factors CAN influence our behavior, they claim that there is evidence that we can NULLIFY this influence and re-take charge of our own behavior. What is the key? Education. Simply put, if we are AWARE of our own biases and the shortcomings of human behavior, we are more likely to correct for them. Example: (f) Racial Bias: Participants are asked to watch a screen and input what they see. What they see are faces (black or white) and words (positive or negative). Results: participants were FASTER at inputting what they saw when the combination was either (white face + positive word) or (black face + negative word) than they were when the combo was either (white + negative) or (black + positive). 4
Sadly, researchers concluded that this was evidence of racial prejudice. BUT, Mele & Shepherd point out, participants were able to overcome this bias when informed about the experiment and instructed to overcome it (by both slowing down on the first two combinations and speeding up on the second two combinations). They take this to be an indication that, if we take the time to become AWARE of external factors that influence our judgments and behavior, we can consciously choose to adjust for them and overcome them. Implementation intentions: This interpretation is supported, they believe, by the fact that people are far more likely to perform a certain action that they are instructed to perform over the next week or month when they take the time initially to form a conscious plan of action (or, an implementation intention ). Conclusion: In short, their hypothesis is this: If you (i) take the time to become aware of the sorts of situations and factors that influence behavior, and (ii) consciously form a plan of action to adjust and account for such factors whenever you notice them, then you will be far less likely to be influenced by them. (e.g., they say that, now that you are aware of the bystander effect, you might be more likely to help someone in need EVEN WHEN there are many other capable people present). What do you think? Do Mele & Shepherd avoid the pessimistic worries? If you consciously adjust for situational influences, are you IN CONTROL of that adjustment? If you succeed, are you PRAISEWORTHY? Or, are you merely one of the lucky ones that was educated to become aware of such influences? 5