Episode 176: Situationism in Psych: Milgram & Stanford Prison Experiments (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: So the way you put it you asked us if you think anyone could do these sorts of things. And then we also have this paper by John Doris, Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics. And in that paper. Well, it's worth just reading quickly the early thesis here. This is page six to summarize. According to the first situationist thesis, behavioral variation among individuals often owes more to distinct circumstances than distinct personalities. The difference between the person who behaves honestly and the one who fails to do so, for example, may be more a function of situation than character.

Moreover, behavior may vary quite radically when compared with that expected on the postulation of a given trait. We have little assurance that a person to whom we attributed a trait will consistently behave in a trait related fashion across a run of of trait relevant situations with variable pressures to such behavior. Putatively honest person may very well not consistently display honest behavior across a diversity of situations where honesty is appropriate. This is just what we would expect on the second situationist thesis which rejects notions of robust traits.

Finally, as the third thesis suggests, expectations of evaluative consistency are likely to be disappointed. Behavioral evidence suggests that personality is comprised of evaluatively fragmented trait associations rather than of evaluatively integrated ones. For example, for a given person, a local disposition to honesty will often be found together with local dispositions to dishonesty. I would agree that. I think that when you put people in unusual circumstances, whether it's the sort of Milgram experiment, the pressure of an authority figure, or even certain types of roles that bring out certain types of sides of them, I think the lesson you would take away from history, from not just the Holocaust, but the war and just the long history of human atrocities and the terrible things people do, is that we are all capable of those sorts of things, or most of us.

I think. I think we're in greater danger of engaging those sorts of behaviors if we think we're exempt. If the lesson of some evil thing that's happened in history is that, oh, it's just those bad people who do that sorts of thing, and good people like me don't do that, then I think you're setting yourself up because people, when they're violent or they do terrible things, it's often moralized, it's often done in a sort of state of self righteousness and sense that they're upholding some good and something like that. But I have a lot of quibbles with this situationist thesis that we read in John Doris.

And I think those two things are consistent. You could say that character matters a lot more than Doris thinks it does and still agree that we're all susceptible under certain circumstances to terrible behavior.

2:49 Dylan: So what is it that you think Doris is getting wrong about this when it comes to his claims about character?

2:58 Wes: Well, he starts out with a situation in which there's a phone booth, and someone walking by the phone booth drops a bunch of papers that scatter in the caller's path. And the question is whether the caller will help that person. And an experiment showed that if there was a dime in the. What is it called? The slots. It's hard to even remember now, it's been so long. But if there is, the idea of a dime that could buy anything is also weird. But if there's a dime in the slot, if they found a free dime, they would be much, much more likely to help the person than not.

So if there's a dime, 14 people helped and two didn't, and then no dime. One person helped and 24 didn't. So that's sort of a stark illustration. It's not even that pressured a situation. Right. The Stanford experiment and Milgram, those are some very high pressure situations and unusual in this case. It's meant to be the mildest of prompts, but it produces dramatic effects.

3:59 Dylan: That's from a family of studies looking at the effect of mood on behavior and showing that sort of good moods make people more likely to help out than bad moods or neutral moods. One of my favorite demonstrations of this is sort of a similar setup where people were asking for help, but they did it either in front of a Cinnabon in the mall or in front of a. And this will date the study, but in front of a Cinnabon or in front of a chess king, which was a really crappy men's clothing store back in the early 90s. And you get effects that. Presumably it's the sweet smell that is putting people in a good mood.

There's all sorts of demonstrations like this that you can situationally manipulate the circumstances to make people more or less likely to be altruistic. And I think Doris is trying to say, well, that shows that it's not that altruistic people are being altruistic. It's just that under the right circumstances, some people are and some people aren't, and that we're making a gross error in assuming that there is stability in these traits.

5:02 Wes: So the larger conclusion is that when we explain people's behavior, we're tempted to call people good or bad, or we're tempted to call people courageous or not courageous or generous or stingy or something like that those have a lot less explanatory value than just the sorts of situations people find themselves in isn't part

5:22 Dolan: of the question whether it's either or. I mean, Doris wants to make the argument for the situationist as being the either versus a certain kind of fixed character notion as the or. He does entertain some subtleties and variations on this to try to give some credit to the stable character side. I hear Wes saying that you can have a notion of character and identity that still admits that our situations matter a lot. Those two things can go together. And just because situations affect us, and it may be a lot more to investigate how much it requires extreme situations to affect us versus mundane situations to affect us. And the quality of those situations may vary from one to the other. Teasing out what is meant by a constant character is at least a more complicated question.

6:19 Wes: Yeah, he's also talking about novel situations with strangers. So he says. Trait attribution is often surprisingly inefficacious in predicting behavior in particular novel situations. Because differing behavioral outcomes often seem a function of situational variation more than individual disposition. To put things crudely, people typically lack character. But I don't think it's true that people typically lack character. In fact, I think that character really is a driving force in people's lives. And the inability to change one's character can be a big problem.

Especially if you have, say, a personality disorder. If you're, say, an extreme narcissist, for instance, and it has a terrible effect on your life. And you go to a therapist. And there's a time when many therapists wouldn't even treat people personality disorders. I'm thinking here of an extreme limiting case of character. But of course, we don't have to have a severe pathology. To have one's life strongly determined by one's character. Which is another way of saying, by the way, you know, for the existentialist, the word would be essence as opposed to existence.

But these novel situations with strangers, I don't think reveal much. What's revealing is the way people interact in relationships and actual, especially close relationships with other human beings. Their capacity for having those attachments, the way they navigate those attachments, that makes an enormous difference in how happy they are. And their character and their behavior is extremely predictable across close relationships. And that's part of the problem. This is what psychoanalysts call transference, this idea of character consistency between relationships.

People's relationships are patterned off each other. And the sort of grounding thing there is character, personality. This is my objection. Character is Such a profoundly morally important thing. And that fact is not really revealed by interactions in novel situations with strangers. It's more revealed by the everyday, typical situations with known quantities, with people we know, people who are close to us. That's really, I think, the important domain for evaluating character.

8:30 Mark: Right. So the distinction between that character as something psychological and character as something ethical is what Doris wants to point out that important to virtue ethics is the idea that there are virtues and these are stable things, these are legitimate ways of characterizing someone's character, that this is an honest person. And he says that somebody like Aristotle is going to think that typically somebody who is honest is also going to be courageous, is also going to be, you know, so generally the virtues cluster together. It's possible to have one without the other. But overall, if you've. There are certain common things to make yourself a virtuous person, you know, maybe to have self control, to have a good sense of yourself that would enable you, once you have one of these virtues, to get hold of the other ones more quickly. And this is the thing that he's objecting to.

9:24 Wes: Well, there's two things, actually. One is that one is whether these virtues cluster together. But the other is just cross situational consistency in any disposition, any virtue. And we don't have to talk about Aristotelian virtues, by the way. We could talk about any ingrained character structure that amounts to a disposition to certain types of behaviors. And we can get as fine grained as moral psychologists, as ethical psychologists. We get as fine grained as we like in those virtues. So we could invent psychodynamic categories of technical language of virtues that no one's even heard of, or vices that no one's heard of.

10:01 Dolan: And in fact, you wouldn't have to emphasize Aristotelian virtues or any kind of virtues at all if you just want to talk about the steadiness of particular characters. Right. So it may be that in fact no one acts according to virtue that Aristotle talks about, but everybody has steadfast characters that are based upon the habits they developed in their lives. And that the older that they get and the more ingrained those habits get, the more they act in accordance to those ruts. And that would demonstrate a steadiness of character and a predictability of behavior, even if it wasn't virtuous. Right.

10:45 Dylan: You seem to be just assuming that there is character here. And let me defend Doris a little bit in what I think is an important point to make, which is I agree that there is stability in interpersonal relationships, and that if you are kind and patient with your spouse at time one, it's probably a good predictor that you'll be kind and patient to spouse at time two, all things being equal, I guess. But I do think that there is something that these experimental demonstrations aren't just weird, novel situations. I think we really do mean in a lay sense that somebody is honest, that they won't cheat on a test, and that they won't lie to their spouse and that they won't cheat on their taxes.

And when we say that somebody tends to be altruistic, we really do mean that if a stranger looks to be in need of help, that they would be more likely to help. And so these experiments, I think, are trying to tap something important about at least the lay sense of what it means to be honest.

11:44 Wes: I just think those three examples you gave. The first two are an entirely different category for me than the last one. So cheating on a test or being nice to one spouse, it's a matter of people you have a relationship with or self or one's own identity. I think you would find that people who are described as honest, you would find that they're not cheating on tests very often. But as far as helping a stranger in a passing situation, most people just think, I'm busy. They've got it. There are all sorts of rationalizations. Yes, you could prompt them to be nicer if they feel lucky or something right before that happens.

But I'm not even sure that it's a measure of how altruistic someone is, realistically how good a measure that situation is. So I just think it's, you know, especially the way we behave with strangers out in public. Especially in a society where people are busy. The public space is almost just a transient space for getting from one place to another. So I just. I don't think it's a good representative situation, that's all. Especially any. Anything with strangers.

12:46 Dylan: Okay, so there's one sense in which there's sort of agreement, like the lay conception of character doesn't. You don't think that it includes behavior towards strangers in these circumstances?

12:58 Wes: It includes a lot of negative virtues, like not going up to the person and kicking in the head, but positive virtues.

13:04 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what Milgram is intending to show. I think that's why Milgram and Zimbardo were such putatively powerful demonstrations for people that presumably these are all people who, one might say has a good moral character. And you could just say, well, that behavior in Those situations isn't what I mean by character. Let's take Dan Ariely, for instance. The behavioral economist has done a lot of studies about cheating. He brings people into the lab, gives them these tasks, manipulates the situation such that they can cheat if they want to gain money.

And he just shows that most people end up cheating a little bit. And he can move that around by changing certain features of the situation. But most people cheat. And I think that there is at least a challenge on the face of it to the view that an honest person, you know, this is a private decision to screw the researcher out of a couple of bucks. And I think that people would say that an honest person wouldn't do that.

13:58 Wes: Well, I think honesty, there's sort of a spectrum. And drawing attention to the way situations change our behaviors is really important. And again, I think we are all susceptible to doing horrible things. Even if we are. You know, maybe there are ideal types out there, exceptional persons, but even a person who's well known in a social circle for being the most altruistic and empathetic person, it wouldn't surprise me to hear that under certain extreme circumstances, they did something horrible. But those sorts of traits all lie along a spectrum, right?

So you could have an exceptionally honest person who gives in to the cheating circumstance that they've been put in. But that doesn't tell you that it isn't the case that in most situations that they have that tendency towards honesty. It doesn't tell you that the tendency towards honesty doesn't exist, especially relative to others. Part of this is relational. When we say someone is really honest, we're comparing them to other people. We're not saying they meet some sort of ideal. And I know Doris addresses some of

15:01 Dolan: this, but I mean, isn't part of the question a what these experiments are telling us at all? And part of that is what kinds of ways we can assess how people will behave in the future or under given situations. One of the accounts is that people have features that are recognizable, measurable in some way that we can identify them and name them and predict how they're going to behave according to some standard. Then we test them. We said that they're honest, and we put them in a situation where they can cheat, and some significant fraction of them end up cheating.

Both things are at issue. And the situationist thesis is it's a funny kind of nature versus nurture argument. On the one hand, the extreme situationist argument is that people are like leaves in the wind, and they behave only according to specific circumstances. The situationist claim is pointing out how people are blown by the worst tendencies. Right? So none of this that I've seen has been talking about how people react really, really positively to positive influences according to situations. And that when they're around people who are friendly and loving and that that translates into them being friendly and loving to other people and everybody is doing much better.

16:23 Wes: And not even just that, but a high stakes situation. So a person who is being given a test and there's money to be gained, it's not a high stakes situation in the sense that the violation of that norm is such a big deal. And there are lots of possible rationalizations like, you know, I'm just paying myself for my time or something like that. So, you know, we say in extraordinary circumstances, a really virtuous person could be made to do vicious or horrible things, but there are lots of thresholds prior to that which are extraordinary in which they would do the right thing.

So again, a high stakes situation where the amount of damage that they might do by being dishonest is big, but in order to avoid doing that, they're willing to take a big hit, they're willing to get hurt, they're willing to lose a lot. I think you could say that the person that we legitimately call virtuous, that they have that disposition and they will stand up to those tests better than other people. And that can be true even if there is some more intense circumstance where they would fall apart and do something horrible.

17:32 Dolan: And you might not even call it disposition, you might call it training.

17:36 Wes: Right.

17:37 Dolan: Using the word disposition. I mean, it could mean that's the way somebody is at a given point, but it has the flavor of this is just the way they are, how they were born or something like that, as opposed to the idea that in dealing with circumstances, whether they be extreme or not extreme.

17:55 Wes: Yeah, I'm using it in this kind of philosophical sense that people use it. It's a different word for virtue. It's a tendency to behave in a certain way, but not necessarily from birth.

18:05 Dolan: But what I'm trying to emphasize here is the idea that the way we behave in some kind of consistency has to do with the kinds of circumstances we've been in. The question of how our behavior has been rutted and habituated based upon the circumstances we have encountered in our lives and how we behave in similar kinds of circumstances versus deviant circumstances. That's pretty interesting. If we're talking about similar circumstances. That seems like probing the way in which a person's character, for lack of a better term is robust. And then the question is how to assess the relative strength of that robustness.

And what would be the measures of that? I mean, at some level, the experiments that we've seen show a failure of that. But it's not clear what the measure is of saying how robust it was in the first place. Right. There is an assumption that you've probed it by seeing the failure. But the denominator, the thing that you are comparing against it seems to have a lot of assumptions in it doesn't seem to be very fixed.

19:12 Dylan: I agree with you guys, actually. I mean, the way that you would really need to show what Doris wants to show is not by having these one shot. Even if it is the case that there are more honest people and less honest people, it wouldn't show us much by just creating situations in which everybody behaved dishonestly or everybody behaved honestly. What you really need is a measure over time of a person's actions. You can't defeat the notion of character by just showing that one time. You can get most people to act in a certain way what you really want.

I think even on the most lay view of what it means to have a disposition or a character is that they just tend to do the right things over time. And none of the studies that Doris talks about in this paper are measures of people over time, but we do have those. And this is something that Doris avoids talking about here because there is actually a really huge literature, as Wes, I think you were saying about personality, and to some extent, personality psychologists have been dealing with this question a great deal. And I think have demonstrated pretty well that there are stable traits.

But you really need a different data set in order to show that. Let's just take something that maybe is morally neutral, but it's still about dispositions. Does somebody who scores high on introversion or extroversion on a personality test actually act in an introverted or extroverted way across situations? And of course it's not the case that they always do. Right. And I feel like Doris is straw manning the view a little bit by just showing that there are some cases where you could get everybody to be extroverted, or some cases where you could get everybody to be introverted.

But we know pretty well that yes, even with self report measures of personality, people who report being introverted, if you measure them across time, they'll be more likely to display introverted behavior and extroverts will do the opposite. But it also matters how you measure it. Right. Which is something that Doris never really Talks about, like, there's no measures of character here that he is defeating with these experiments. And so it turns out if you ask people broadly, are you an extrovert or an introvert, that will be less predictive.

Then if you ask people, hey, when you're around friends, are you extroverted? How about when you're around strangers? That'll get you more prediction. And then you can ask more and more specific questions. The more specific you get, the better stability you'll find over time. And then you have the question about, okay, when do we stop calling it a disposition and just call it being a leaf blown in the wind? But I think that's been shown.

21:42 Seth: Right.

21:42 Wes: That's very helpful, by the way, with just everything you just said. It's very clarifying, you know, but for me, it's just because I think about psychopathology so much, it's even more obvious. So if you diagnose someone with borderline personality disorder, one of the criteria is, say, a pattern of these unstable and intense relationships with other people, family, friends and loved ones. And they swing back and forth between idealization and love and then anger and hate. And that's not only stable, it's absurdly

22:14 Dylan: rigid, it's characterized by its rigidity. Exactly.

22:18 Wes: Yeah. And so hard to change and so hard to help people who have that problem. It's not like psychopathology is the standard here, because it's sort of the extreme end of things. But if we look at character traits in general, I'm suggesting that that rigidity at the very extreme end, the less pathological character traits or traits that have nothing to do necessarily with pathology, like introversion, extroversion, and even if they're not as rigid, you would still expect some sort of stability, let's say.

22:50 Dylan: Right. And so one way to ask it is if you did a Milgram experiment in various ways over. Let's just say you could get retrograde amnesics who can't form new memories or whatever, and you just get them and do the Milgram experiment a bunch of times. Would you get people who obeyed all the way be more likely to obey all the way every time they took it? And were the people who opposed it, and then all the people in between who are more or less uncomfortable, would you see some stability over time? And I think that you would.

23:17 Wes: But this question of thresholds that I brought up, you could set a threshold in a situation that's too low or too high. If it's too high, you could get everyone, let's say, no matter how virtuous to do something horrible or do something, and if it's too low, if the stakes aren't high enough, and it's fine to disagree with me, but to me it doesn't tell you a huge amount whether or not someone helps someone pick up their papers. So that's my question, involves getting to the right threshold, a high enough stake situation, but not one that's so high that it's going to defeat everyone. And those higher stakes situations, I think, involve our closer relationships with people rather than our interactions with strangers.

23:58 Dolan: Let's say we're in the middle on this, that there are certain thresholds for being able to determine or talk about people's behavior. One of the things lurking in both the Milgram and the Zimbardo experiments is the question of the effect of situation on accountability. So to what extent ought people be held accountable or are they culpable for their behavior in given situations? And we would acknowledge that there's a certain extreme amount of situation that we would purge people of their culpability. And typically that measure to me would mean you're being forced in a very personal way, very focused on you, usually involving violence that would relieve you of your culpability for your decisions.

You can't be held responsible for them. And where it becomes much more murky, in which Zimbardo seems to be explicitly applying, was the whole idea that anybody can turn this way and it doesn't involve them being persuaded or forced in the kind of extreme way I just described, but that circumstances, situations can be much more subtle in causing people who we would normally recognize as being perfectly reasonable, sociable people to do in groups really horrible things or even as individuals, maybe that might be the implication of Milgram's, but it might not be quite the same.

Does the effect of these experiments and these conclusions and maybe understanding them more, even if it's not completely situationist, a more situationist understanding of our psychology affect the way we ought to understand people's cultural culpability to the extent of we ought to understand the way our justice system works or the way we ought to forgive or not forgive our lovers or things like that.

26:01 Dylan: That is the question Zimbardo really does, and especially in recent years, he really is driving this line that therefore we are not to be held responsible for bad actions. I've never thought that that followed because there's a way in which if your disposition caused you to behave in a certain way and not the situation, it's still unclear to me that I can hold you responsible to take the examples of psychopathology? I don't know that I am more likely to think that somebody with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder is responsible for the behaviors because it emanated from something deep within their psychology. It may be the case that what we want is something like an Aristotelian view to hold people responsible where they have shaped their situations such that they would have these dispositions.

26:53 Wes: That's a very existentialist point of view, actually.

26:56 Dolan: Yeah, I guess I'm thinking more about the force of community. Two examples that came to mind. One is in Doris. He provides a sort of personal situation where you have somebody who's in a relationship. They haven't cheated on their spouse, but they put themselves in a situation of, you know, going to an intimate dinner with somebody that they've had somewhat of a flirtatious relationship with. And that increases the likelihood that they will actually end up cheating because they've put themselves in a situation where they could be more easily compromised.

And another situation would be you're a member of a community where the social force is in one of these directions that we would point to as saying is horrible. I mean, pick your example of Germany During World War II, the treatment of slaves in the United States, or being in a community where American Indians are being run off and marched by you. I mean, you just come up with a litany of different circumstances in which a group of people are ignoring the pain and suffering of another group of people or even of individuals. And there is, in part of that action, some kind of authority about what's going on.

That seems to be very related to the kinds of things we see in the Milgram and the Zimbardo experiments to try to understand the effect of situation and authority on those people's behavior, whether it be positive or negative. I mean, the positive side would be something like what happens after hurricanes or other kinds of disasters. Everybody talks about how people are coming together and helping each other out. But it seems to be like the positive corollary of this kind of situationist psychology.

28:44 Dylan: I think that the way that you said it is right in that what these studies in this body of work, to me, like the take home message is. I think Doris comes down on something like this. It's something like moral humility and maybe patience with other people. I think the strongest view of the dispositional approach that Doris is arguing against is that the people who didn't speak up against the slaves were just evil people. And the people who let the Native Americans March by and didn't help were just evil people. But the reality is that any situation could overpower any of us.

And so I should just adjust what I think about other human beings when they engage in bad activity and not use my very basic view of what character is as a way to blame other people or as a way to predict my own future behavior at some moral risk. Doris puts a reflection on situationism has an obvious benefit. In deliberation, it may serve to remind us that for people like us, the world is a morally dangerous place. So sort of knowing that the world is morally dangerous for all of us, even if, like, I am 65% more likely to be honest than you or whatever.

Right.

29:57 Wes: I think that's. That's my view as well, which is that it still makes sense to talk about virtues. It's just that even a very, very virtuous person could end up doing horrible things. Or especially in a society that condones slavery, you could have someone who's very ethical and just and magnanimous and all sorts of other things in most contexts of life, just not get it in that context. And they have a whole. There's a whole ideology that goes along with that. There's a tendency in that case to see people as not being human beings or whatever justifications occur, but also even the fact that the circumstance might elicit their more sadistic qualities or stuff like that. So human beings are complex enough to be both dispositional and situational at the same time.

30:47 Dylan: What's funny is that I find that in making this sort of the upshot of his argument where he says, you know, this is teaching us that the world is a morally dangerous place and we should reflect. And we. This almost sounds like he is promoting this as a virtue. Like, at the end, I was like, wait, isn't that kind of a virtue?

31:05 Wes: They thought that. Yeah, I had the same idea. He talks at a certain point about. He doesn't say this, but the virtue of being able to attend to situations. And that is also a disposition, and it's one you can actually cultivate. It's extremely important one. If you're trying to improve yourself and you pay attention, you'll notice that you're not falling with a bad crowd, for instance, or if you want to modify your behavior, you have to be very, very careful about the sorts of situations you put yourself in. It's absolutely true. And cultivating that disposition is not easy. It requires habituation. And so, yeah, it's interesting that he didn't even address that. I thought I'M sure he's going to address this idea that we ought to attend to our situations could be thought of as a kind of virtue.

31:55 Mark: But I think that he thinks that these virtues need to be described in a way that they are very situation specific. So it's not that you learn in general to attend. It's not that you become a generally more aware person, but that I think about somebody who's trying to become more mindful over time. It's not that mindfulness overall, there is a some habit, but you kind of have to test it out to practice it with every different kind of thing like that. There are so many individual skills. It's not just becoming mindfulness in general, like becoming strong in general.

You have to exercise all your different little muscles. So I think that's the thing he has a problem with. It's not that there's courage in general. It's courage in the face of this kind of challenge. It's courage in the face of this kind of challenge. And the fact that somebody is courageous or honest in the face of certain kinds of temptation or certain kinds of situations. If they're not specifically prepared for, if they're not practiced, then some new emergent situation could come up that they will not act in the way that you would think.

And that's exactly what I think is happening. You know, I totally, I'm sure, would have been caught by Milgram in this thing. Not because I'm, you know, totally weak willed or something, but just because, like, this is weird, this is an unfamiliar situation. Like, I'm not sure, you know, I'm on guard against so many things, but this was not one of them.

33:16 Wes: You have to go out on lots of dates with co workers before you develop the skill of being faithful. That's one way to do it. You could just avoid the situation or you master it, but repeatedly failing.

33:32 Dylan: This is why Gandhi slept with, you know, young naked women, to test his. To get his willpower up.

33:40 Dolan: I like Mark's point a lot because it highlights how you rely on other normative circumstances in order to guide yourself through unfamiliar circumstances. And it seems to me that that's explicated in the sensitivity, in the way in which the obedience is working. Right? So it matters if it's Yale versus Podunk U that no one's ever heard of. It matters that the guy.

34:06 Dylan: It was actually University of Bridgeport in his examples. It was a university.

34:11 Dolan: Okay, fair enough. It matters that the guy's wearing a white light lab coat and looks like he is an eminent PhD scientist with credentials.

34:22 Seth: Right.

34:22 Dolan: It matters that you're further away from the person. You can't actually see them. That you end up holding on to other normative factors in order to judge what the situation is. And maybe there's something to be said that you end up having a tendency to maybe over normalize it and get kind of screwed up in that respect. Which again points to the fact of being absent other individuals to help you renormalize situations makes you much more vulnerable. Stick with the buddy system. Buddy system makes a big difference.

34:54 Dylan: It reminds me a little bit of the kind of generalization curves you see in learning behavior where you have like a conditioned response to like Pavlov's dogs. Right. They hear a bell and they get food. They hear a bell, they get food. Pretty soon they start salivating to the bell. Well, you can show across all these learning experiments that there is a nice generalization curve that if the bell is one note off from the original bell, then they kind of respond. And then if the bell is two notes off, then they kind of respond but a little bit less.

And the further away you get from a similarity of the stimulus, the less likely they are to respond in the same way. And that's sort of what I see as our moral training, which is you're having a lot of willpower about this particular thing is not necessarily going to translate into something completely different. But we train ourselves in these various domains to try to do our best, to overlap, to cover the ground across various situations. So it's important, I think, to realize that it's just like with training for anything. I think just because you develop fast hands at ping pong doesn't mean you're going to be good at basketball.

Yeah.

36:00 Dolan: Or being very, very dedicated to your physical training as an athlete doesn't mean that you will be very, very dedicated to your obligations to your spouse.

36:11 Dylan: Right.

36:12 Mark: Well. And being this obedience thing, you know, the way Milgram puts it, that it's two different values competing. So it's not just that you're training yourself to not be a sadistic bastard, but you're training yourself in what are situations in which it's appropriate to resist social pressure, that we are naturally social animals most of the time. It's kind of good to go along with other people in terms of helping, being a cooperative, non trouble causing individual. And so it's just a matter of being on the lookout for circumstances in which you should not do that.

36:46 Dolan: That's a good point. That having people who are well adjusted into functioning in society might actually positively select for people who are more agreeable.

36:56 Mark: Yeah, Being trusting seems a virtue.

36:58 Dolan: Yeah, exactly. And so absent significant other signals, it's in fact very hard to get them not to cooperate because their habit and tendency is to cooperate to help out a situation that has all the signs of being for the good of the community, for the good of people in authority and stuff like that. And you've actually selected for people who behave like that, who are good citizens in some way.

37:26 Dylan: On the latest partially examined life, A defense of the Nazis is just really nice people. They couldn't help it.

37:38 Dolan: You would like to have people have a lot of dedication to positive interactions amongst each other. Right. But what you might end up with is having people having strong dedication to or citizenship or group identity towards their group identity. And it might be in fact very hard. We could come up with a bunch of examples where what's actually hard is to get people to go against the group identity that they're hooked into.

38:08 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's an interesting point. I mean, when you look at the sorts of people who might lead a moral movement, who might be the first few abolitionists, might have been contrarian individuals, right? Yeah, they might have actually been disagreeable people, but it took that sort of person who was willing to be scorned and mocked and excluded to be able to do that. And those people, if there is an underlying trait, there might actually not be anything like they just happen to be morally virtuous. I mean, the sort of person who devotes their life to protesting for a cause, they might actually not be the best people to have around.

They might actually be kind of assholes, but they're willing to work for one particular champion, a particular cause at the expense of other aspects of their life. Whereas I totally would have gone all the way in the Milgram experiment. Just so nice.

38:59 Seth: I'm just.

39:01 Mark: What I also think I. I buy Zimbardo's overall political point. And I watched a separate talk of him addressing Abu Ghraib and his experience defending one of the people, the lower level soldiers that was involved in that. This just really speaks to our fundamental political ethos that if you think everybody just needs to be more individually moral and then everything will work out better, whereas the more determinist liberal response is no, it's the system. You know, this is Marx's point. Set up a good system and people will generally behave well. Set up a crappy system that rewards bad behavior, then you'll get people behaving badly. If that's the way you're going to characterize the difference, then I think the determinist, the Marxist, wins hands down.

39:45 Dylan: You know, it reminds me of My advisor in grad school, was trained in clinical psychology. He didn't become a clinician, but he told me this story about when he was doing his internship. He was in the psych ward. I think this was in the 70s, maybe early 80s. And there was a particular patient, he was in the schizophrenic area of the. Of the hospital. And there was a patient who every night would go out and would go to the office of the director, the head doctor there, and he would take a shit right outside his door, and then he would go back to his room.

And this was really problematic. So they put my advisor, Peter Salovey, in charge and said, you know, work with this patient. This is problematic behavior. You know, they had these theories about he was metaphorically Berkeley sort of shitting on the head doctor, and he had to, like, work with his patient to get rid of the problem. A week later, they met again. The behavior had completely gone away. And they asked him, they said, wow, what did you do? How did you talk to him to get rid of this behavior? And he said, I just took him to the bathroom before he went to bed every night.

And it's like, you know, even if there was some internal motivation to shit on the director, it doesn't mean that you can't set up a system in which you're going to get the best results.

40:55 Mark: Well, and we'd mentioned, you know, that these are all about negative things. So one of the links that I'll post for people my wife made me aware of that was going on recently was this Compassion Games. It was set up in a women's prison. Players earn points for logging acts of compassion, for helping each other, for sharing things, for cleaning each other's spaces. And it just apparently immediately really turned things around. And this has since been implemented, like, in troubled high schools and a number of places around the world now. And so just setting up any kind of incentive system for good things, you know, who knows if that kind of thing.

I don't know enough about it to see, like, does it work in the long term or is it just like, okay, people were nice to each other for a couple weeks and then like, that doesn't sound like a solution in particular for a permanent thing. But who knows?

41:41 Dylan: That kind of behavioral, sort of the reward. Setting up a schedule of rewards for good behavior is pretty much the only thing that works with children with antisocial personality, like severe antisocial personality disorders or psychopaths. And I think you're right. I don't know that they internalize it when they're out of that environment. But hell, man, it works.

42:01 Wes: Gamification, there's the gamification part about it

42:04 Dolan: and there's the rewards part about it. But I want to just defend it vigorously because the typical objection to it to me would be, well, you shouldn't be paying people to act properly. Properly. Or you shouldn't be rewarding them to just act the way they ought to be acting. But I would say that for most of those people who are saying that there are all kinds of incentives that they're going on in their lives to encourage them to act in that way, act in whatever virtuous way they want to, right? And they're not recognizing them as incentives along those lines, but they are just like that.

Wanting to go out and stay in school and pay my taxes and be a member of my society. One significant encouragement to do that is I get rewards out of doing that. But if you're in a situation where you're not getting rewards out of doing that, we talk about people who they show up to work even though they're getting paid shit and eventually they find success later in life and that's all predicated. They, with few exceptions, are going to have to be in a position where they think they're going to get that. But if you don't think you're going to get that reward, you're not going to do it.

And it doesn't strike me as rocket science that you need to feel like you're going to get some kind of benefit out of suffering, out of doing hard activities and that getting positive rewards for doing certain kinds of activities matters. And we get them implicitly and explicitly all the time.

43:23 Dylan: I think that people have some sort of. Maybe one of the lessons here in Doris argument that I think is valid is that it may not be that a sort of character based approach is the best way to view human psychology. But what I think he's saying is that the lay view of what character is, is really what needs to change. It's just the wrong view of how stable and robust these character traits are. And so for some reason I think we like to think that people would be altruistic and self sacrificing and that they're virtuous when it's in the absence of all reward.

In almost a weird way where like I want you to be miserable while you're Helping me when you carry it to that extent. Your point is well taken. About like a reward is not just giving a kid $5. Right. You can empirically demonstrate that that actually is the bad kind of reward to give a kid $5 every time he's nice to his sister. But what's a really powerful finding is kids are rewarded by things like putting your hand on their shoulder, telling them that they did a good job. And when you do that, when parents focus on that with a problem kids behavior really starts changing.

You fail to reward the bad behavior and you reward the good behavior. But a reward can be anything like just telling them they're a good kid or giving them a hug or whatever it is. Right. It might be idiosyncratic, validating and recognizing

44:41 Dolan: them and engaging with them as an individual human being.

44:44 Dylan: That's weird.

44:46 Dolan: Imagine that.

44:48 Mark: It's part of what makes Transformers. These findings, even if accurate to the real world, difficult in that if you're talking about what are our policies for running my prison or running soldiers lives, these are environments where you have total control over a person. And even in an individual classroom or bringing in somebody to be an experimental subject. And it's a very closed situation. And so comparing that to overall social incentives is difficult. I mean, does it really demoralize people to have Trump serving as this kind of example and dividing people?

Like maybe. But it seems like the amount of influence that someone that far removed from any individual human being is going to be so diluted compared to other things going on in their lives. What does this mean for social policy? You could try to influence certain behaviors, but in terms of fostering a culture of helping or something like that outside of a prison or school environment, that would be a hard thing to do.

45:51 Dylan: I think that you're right that really like the environment is so complex that the reward structure, the contingencies in the environment can never be properly controlled. Right. It's great to be able to have people in this setting that is tightly controlled. Maybe that's the sort of wisdom that Doris is pushing for here, where it's some acknowledgment of the constraints of even the best trained. You can set up your life just right so that you behave appropriately in all the circumstances that you're familiar with. And something might happen. You put in a situation that you've never seen before. In those situations you just never know what's going to happen. We can't control all of that. But again, it rests on this weird notion that humility in the face of that might be something that you can cultivate.

46:33 Mark: Well, I think we're in the home stretch here. Should we kind of give some closing statements and wrap up here?

46:38 Dolan: I really enjoyed reading the articles, and I think the topic is really rich, and I appreciate David coming on, and I think he added a lot to putting some context on some of the experiments and helping me with understanding where we are at with them. But I myself come down, you know, thinking that it's very persuasive that situations affect our behavior and that we adjust it. We bend in the wind at the very least. But it also seems not to be definitive to me on the basis of these experiments or the other ones. I said that there's no such thing as character like features or trait like features of people's behavior.

And so to me, it's still a kind of interesting and pertinent question how that cashes out for accountability for people and accountability in terms of whether it be in our personal relationships or in the laws that we have, what the effect of situations are on people's behaviors and choices. And it seems to me that there's a lot of really interesting and terrifying gray area in those cases. And if anything, we have a tendency to. Maybe this is part of what you get out of the Milgram and the Zimbardo experiments, to the extent that they feel so surprising, is that our tendency is to expect that we're kind of puritanical or have higher unreasonable expectations of how people ought to behave and that we ought to learn at least that from it, that we're much more fragile and situational creatures than we like to think we are.

48:20 Mark: Yeah, I agree. I don't think this. As Wes was pointing out, I don't think this is a good argument against having traits in general, but I don't think that's what Doris was going for. I think that it is an argument against what David was referring to as a lay theory of personality. Just these ideas that there are good people and there are bad people, you know, that there but for the grace of God go I is a much more accurate sentiment. I don't think either of these studies is particularly strong as science. In certain ways. They're both kind of symbolic. Right. If you want to say, I've proven that the Holocaust could happen here through either of these. No, you haven't. They're not even close. But it's suggestive. It works for the humanities. It gets a discussion going.

49:02 Wes: Yeah, I think these three papers are. They're such a great combination.

49:06 Dolan: They are a great combination to Think about these.

49:08 Wes: Very, very well known, because I hadn't connected these. Obviously. I had come across descriptions of these experiments somewhere at college, high school, but I hadn't thought about them in relation to virtue ethics. And I think it has to change the way you think about dispositions and virtues and personality, all those sorts of things. It's important to keep the situationalist perspective in mind. And David, you're great. Thanks for coming on. You have the podcasting virtue not just on your own podcast, but across all podcasts, except for the most shocking podcasts. Yeah, this was great. Thank you. Thank you.

49:50 Dylan: Yeah, no, thank you guys. This was great. I really, really appreciated you guys having me on and I thought it was a great conversation.

49:56 Mark: I think it was great that Bob Wright provided a comparison point. What is it? Where you're calibrating the machines to a consistent signal? Since Bob Wright has appeared on your podcast and our podcast and Econ Talk, Sam Harris, and in a few other places. So you can rate the quality of the various podcasts by listening to the same guest.

50:17 Dylan: Exactly. That guy is making the rounds.

50:20 Mark: Next time, we're going to actually do more of the wealth of nations by Adam Smith with Russ Roberts, the host of Econ Talk. People should go to our Facebook page. Let us know how you like this. Maybe do some cross subscribing. If you're a fan of one thing, maybe subscribe to the other. Why not do these things? You could compare the Facebook groups of each of the podcasts and see which one is better. You could email us point by point why Very Bad Wizards is better than us. Because at least when people post a Reddit, that's what they do. That's what people.

50:52 Dylan: That's right.

50:53 Mark: Philosophize This is better than both of you by far.

50:57 Dylan: Which group of listeners is more honest, really more virtuous?

51:02 Mark: They seem not to hold back whenever they have anything potentially critical to say. It's hard not to be immediately defensive, but they did listen to us in order to have something obnoxious to say. So probably you should, you know, be generous in how you interpret them. Hey, if you're wondering where Seth disappeared to, he had some technical problems and had to wake up early, so he ended up dropping off. Our closing song is called Doing the Wrong Thing from the brand new Live at Berklee album by Kaki King, whom I interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 54. Check it out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com hey, good night, everybody.

51:37 Dolan: Good night.