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Continuing with Dave Pizarro on articles by Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and John Doris about situationism, which entails that people's level of morality will vary by situation, as opposed to virtue ethics, which posits that how people will act in a novel situation will be determined by the quality of their character.
We get into Doris's article, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics" (1998), where he argues against the traditional idea that we have virtues like "honesty." Instead, these traits are more situation-specific, so even someone who doesn't cheat on his or her taxes or spouse might well still steal candy. Doris sites a 1975 study by Levin and Isen where people who found a (planted) dime in a phone booth were much more likely to then help someone who dropped some papers as the subject was leaving the booth. Does this really show that helpfulness isn't a stable virtue in people, or is something else going on here and in Milgram's experiment? Does situationism excuse bad behavior? Would any one of us do just what most the citizens of Germany did during the Nazi regime if we were in that situation? Can we maybe train ourselves to better resist social pressure, not just in specific situations we've rehearsed in advance, but across the board?
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After having missed the last few months’ worth of episodes, this topic had me excited for a refresher.
First, Dave was a fantastic and informative guest, and the discussion of character was inspiring. Still, I’d hoped that the conversation would put some of this stuff into context with the rampant social engineering and data-fueled real-time experimentation that’s currently on the rise pretty much everywhere. I have to think that at least some other listeners who’ve been reading the Atlantic or the Guardian over the past couple of years might be scratching their heads at Dylan (you’re usually my hero, Dylan) “vigorously” defending gamification and leaving it at that.
Yes, incentives can be useful, but when should we have the freedom to construct or discover them organically or for ourselves, and when should larger powers be allowed to compose and arrange them at their discretion? When do incentives actually cheapen or subvert the activities they’re embedded in? When should they be organized by communities, when by corporations, and when by governments? As we become ever more connected, in which systems and in what areas is it even possible to extend or withhold such privileges? Should their be incentives or disincentives for every behavior that we can take a moral stance on or engineer a nudge for? If not, which ones? How do we know (and should we know) when we’re in someone’s experiment and when we aren’t? Most of all, at what point does mapping out general vulnerabilities to persuasion or manipulation become complicit with those very practices?
All this is just to say that an offhand hooray for prodding the public into the good life seems uncharacteristically hasty from you bunch. Food for thought:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/kahneman-tversky-invisible-mind-manipulators/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/internet-of-things-predictable-people
I just discovered your podcast and loved it! But I was frustrated during this episode because I kept wanting you to apply Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory to Milgram. Using that theory would say that people were in conflict because they had two basic moral foundations in conflict: care for people and respect for authority (not community as suggested in the podcast). Respect for authority is stronger among conservatives than among progressives and has been declining over time, especially among the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies). Thus, fewer people would probably obey the instructions now than when Milgram did this experiment, especially if it was a Yale. These also vary by culture, for example both Germans and Japanese are stronger in respect for authority than the US. Here’s the official website for Haidt’s theory.
http://www.moralfoundations.org/