If our situation controls our behavior (let’s try to bracket “to what extent” and “how” it does so), then wouldn’t it also control what kind of situation we will go for?
Here’s an example from an Orwell essay:
“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”
And then I’ve always wondered about the following: If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?
Note that the folk do seem to allow for some ‘situationism’ - for example, when someone gets drunk, we admit they’ll have a different persona and some more than others.
If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?
Jones and Nisbett attempted to answer this question in their classic paper on actor-observer bias. It’s an interesting read.
However, beware of falling into an overly strict interpretation of situationism (as I think Jones and Nisbett did) which amounts to little more than behaviorism in new clothes. People do tend to underestimate the extent to which their behavior and the behavior of others is driven by the environment, but there is nevertheless still goodevidence that stable dispositions predict a respectable chunk of the variance in a person’s behavior (where “respectable” means “similar in size to that for the situational data”). One of the errors of the strict situationist movement that arose in the late 1960s and 1970s is that it relied on an implicit endorsement of Kahneman and Tversky’s “law of small numbers”: situationist researchers erroneously expected a very small sample of a person’s behavior (such as a single encounter with a person in need of help) to be representative of the general population of behaviors from which it was drawn. Not surprisingly, they found that stable dispositions are a modest predictor of these small samples of behavior. However, we have since learned that when behavior is properly aggregated across time, a robust effect of stable dispositions reliably emerges.
So in short, part of the reason that people have robust theories of character traits is almost surely that they actually map pretty well onto the territory. Situationism remains a useful paradigm, but it can easily be taken too far.
Will our situation affect which situation we will go for? Of course.
One reason the folk may have such a robust theory of character traits is that it successfully predicts behavior. But the reason for this is because we mostly only see people in the same situations, not because they do or would behave reliably in very different situations.
Then again, maybe we theorize in terms of character traits only because we hang out in communities of people who demonstrate the fundamental attribution fallacy.
I managed to read Anlamk’s comment without this occurring to me. Thanks for saying it.
So the fundamental attribution error could be situational! It may have been a fundamental attribution error for me to have immediately assumed that it needs a “deeper” explanation.
The explanation that I usually read is that it’s a cultural phenomenon, that within Chinese culture in particular, people are more inclined to describe others as inhabiting various roles instead of having persistent character traits (with this being reflected in some older Chinese literature and philosophical traditions) - but this is mostly just a vague impression I have that was probably formed by reading blog posts by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, so take this with a grain of salt. ;)
An amusing bit of trivia: among the Japanese nobility at the time The Tale of Genji was being written, referring to someone by their name was a privilege reserved for family and very close acquaintances (and not something that would be appropriate to do in public), so all the characters in the story are referred to by titles and descriptions of various kinds—and these “names” change when the characters end up in different life circumstances.
within Chinese culture in particular, people are more inclined to describe others as inhabiting various roles instead of having persistent character traits.
Fascinating. Makes me want to do some research on this to see whether Chinese-raised people would behave differently because of this.
If our situation controls our behavior (let’s try to bracket “to what extent” and “how” it does so), then wouldn’t it also control what kind of situation we will go for?
Here’s an example from an Orwell essay: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”
And then I’ve always wondered about the following: If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?
Note that the folk do seem to allow for some ‘situationism’ - for example, when someone gets drunk, we admit they’ll have a different persona and some more than others.
Jones and Nisbett attempted to answer this question in their classic paper on actor-observer bias. It’s an interesting read.
However, beware of falling into an overly strict interpretation of situationism (as I think Jones and Nisbett did) which amounts to little more than behaviorism in new clothes. People do tend to underestimate the extent to which their behavior and the behavior of others is driven by the environment, but there is nevertheless still good evidence that stable dispositions predict a respectable chunk of the variance in a person’s behavior (where “respectable” means “similar in size to that for the situational data”). One of the errors of the strict situationist movement that arose in the late 1960s and 1970s is that it relied on an implicit endorsement of Kahneman and Tversky’s “law of small numbers”: situationist researchers erroneously expected a very small sample of a person’s behavior (such as a single encounter with a person in need of help) to be representative of the general population of behaviors from which it was drawn. Not surprisingly, they found that stable dispositions are a modest predictor of these small samples of behavior. However, we have since learned that when behavior is properly aggregated across time, a robust effect of stable dispositions reliably emerges.
So in short, part of the reason that people have robust theories of character traits is almost surely that they actually map pretty well onto the territory. Situationism remains a useful paradigm, but it can easily be taken too far.
Will our situation affect which situation we will go for? Of course.
One reason the folk may have such a robust theory of character traits is that it successfully predicts behavior. But the reason for this is because we mostly only see people in the same situations, not because they do or would behave reliably in very different situations.
Then again, maybe we theorize in terms of character traits only because we hang out in communities of people who demonstrate the fundamental attribution fallacy.
Interestingly, I’ve read that the fundamental attribution error is less strong in East Asian cultures, such as China and Japan.
I managed to read Anlamk’s comment without this occurring to me. Thanks for saying it.
So the fundamental attribution error could be situational! It may have been a fundamental attribution error for me to have immediately assumed that it needs a “deeper” explanation.
The explanation that I usually read is that it’s a cultural phenomenon, that within Chinese culture in particular, people are more inclined to describe others as inhabiting various roles instead of having persistent character traits (with this being reflected in some older Chinese literature and philosophical traditions) - but this is mostly just a vague impression I have that was probably formed by reading blog posts by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, so take this with a grain of salt. ;)
An amusing bit of trivia: among the Japanese nobility at the time The Tale of Genji was being written, referring to someone by their name was a privilege reserved for family and very close acquaintances (and not something that would be appropriate to do in public), so all the characters in the story are referred to by titles and descriptions of various kinds—and these “names” change when the characters end up in different life circumstances.
Fascinating. Makes me want to do some research on this to see whether Chinese-raised people would behave differently because of this.
[Insert comment that is itself an instance of the fundamental attribution error here!]