Abstract
Social psychologists have performed many well-known experiments demonstrating that experimental subjects will perform in ways that are normatively inconsistent even across very similar situations. Situationist social psychologists and philosophers have often interpreted these findings to imply that most people lack general moral dispositions. These situationists have argued that our moral dispositions are at best narrowly local traits; they often describe our moral characters as fragmented. In this paper, I offer an alternative hypothesis for the same experimental results. I argue that these normative inconsistencies in behavior might well be produced by habit interference: experimental subjects err by over-generalizing dispositions formed in prior situations. I ground this alternative hypothesis in the long tradition of transfer of learning studies, which demonstrated that cognitive inconsistency was often the result of habit interference and, hence, overly generalized dispositions. I shall thus explore the analogy between moral and cognitive inconsistency to show why social psychology might well benefit from adopting the experimental design of the classic transfer of learning studies.
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Notes
Although “cognitive” psychology is often contrasted with Thorndike’s “behaviorism,” in this paper I will contrast Thorndike’s “cognitive” situationism with Ross and Nisbett’s “social” situationism.
Doris (2002: 179n 38) does acknowledge the seminal influence of Thorndike in a footnote: “The theoretical perspective Hartshorne and May espoused was suggested more than two decades earlier by Thorndike (1906: 248), but Hartshorne and May’s work is generally taken to be the first significant empirical study suggesting such a view.” Actually, as we shall see, Thorndike and others conducted many empirical studies claiming to show the specificity of cognitive dispositions; Hartshorne and May claimed to show the specificity of moral dispositions. Daniel Russell (2009: 252) traces situationism only back to Mischel: “It seems safe to say that the school of thought in empirical psychology we now call situationism first rallied as an identifiable movement with the appearance of Michel’s landmark 1968 book, Personality and Assessment.”
By contrast, the moral situationism of Hartshorne and May and their successors was subjected to scrutiny by philosophers, such as William Alston (1975). Since the publication of Walter Mischel’s (1968) critical review of the technical literature in personality psychology and Ross and Nisbett’s (1991) review of social psychology in relation to moral and political conduct, philosophers John Doris (1998, 2002, 2005, 2010), Gilbert Harman (1999, 2000, 2003, 2009), Peter Vranas (2005, 2009) and others have deployed the findings of social psychology, largely as interpreted by Mischel, Ross, and Nisbett, to make the case against the traditional psychology of general dispositions thought to underlie the moral virtues. Meanwhile, philosophers Joel Kupperrman (2001), Gopal Sreenivasan (2002), Robert Solomon (2003), Nafsika Athanassoulis (2000), Christian Miller (2003, 2009), Julia Annas (2003), Rachana Kamtekar (2004), and Daniel Russell (2009), among others, have all, to varying degrees, defended traditional virtue theory.
Milgram himself (1974: 133–145) interpreted his experiments to reveal a strong, general disposition to obey authorities.
To translate Aristotle into modern psychology “every instance of learning is a function of the already existent learned organization of the subject; that is, all learning is influenced by transfer” (McGeoch 1952: 346).
The converse is not widely accepted among psychologists. As Doris explains: “Not every consistent behavior pattern is telling evidence for trait attribution: If someone consistently behaves gregariously across a run of situations where most everyone would, their behavior is not decisive evidence for extraversion. Rather, it is individuating behavior—behavior that is outside the population norm for a situation—that counts as evidence for trait attribution” (Doris 2002: 19).
Each philosopher no doubt means something different by “fragmented.” Vranas alone attempts to clarify what he means by “fragmented”: “My definition of fragmentation makes no presuppositions about why the agent behaves sometimes deplorably and other times admirably; in particular, the definition does not presuppose that the agent has a ‘modular mind’ (Fodor 1983) or a ‘fragmented psyche’ consisting of good and evil parts interlocked in a Manichean struggle” (Vranas 2005: 4).
Jesse Prinz makes the same rash inference: “studies show that a relatively minor situation manipulation with no obvious moral significance exerts a major influence on people’s moral behavior….This suggests that if people have traits, they may be narrower than the traits postulated by virtue theorists” (2009: 119).
On similarity as the basis for habit interference, see Postman (1971: 1053–1054, 1088, 1104, 1116, 1117).
Even strength training in the right hand and the right arm alone measurably increased the strength of the left hand and left arm. Training one hand to draw or throw a ball had much larger effects on the other hand.
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I am indebted to discussions about this paper with my colleague, Benjamin Valentino, and to the editorial assistance of Grace Park and Yevgenia Rem.
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Murphy, J.B. Does Habit Interference Explain Moral Failure?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 255–273 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0220-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0220-5