Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have Christian Miller on the podcast. Doctor
Speaker 1: Miller is ac Read Professor of Philosophy at wake Forest
Speaker 1: University and director of the Character Project, funded by the
Speaker 1: John Tempton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is
Speaker 1: the author of over seventy five papers, as well as
Speaker 1: the author of Moral Character and Empirical Theory, Character and
Speaker 1: Moral Psychology, and most recently, the book The Character Gap.
Speaker 1: How good are we? Hey, Christian, thanks so much for
Speaker 1: chatting with me today. Thanks so much for having me
Speaker 1: on your show. So how good are we really? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a big question to start us off right away? Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, let's not mess around. So one question is
Speaker 1: what is good mean here? And what are our standards
Speaker 1: that we're going to be used to evaluate whether someone
Speaker 1: is good or not. Another question is who the we is?
Speaker 1: And then another question still is what source of evidence
Speaker 1: am I going to be using to decide how good
Speaker 1: are we? But let me I'll say something briefly on
Speaker 1: each of those. So the good I have in mind
Speaker 1: here when we say how good are we? Is virtuous.
Speaker 1: So I'm a philosopher who works in the area of ethics,
Speaker 1: and within area of ethics, there's a long standing tradition
Speaker 1: to think about good people and bad people in terms
Speaker 1: of the kind of character they have and whether they're
Speaker 1: virtuous people or vicious people. And so I could say
Speaker 1: a lot more about what I mean by a virtue
Speaker 1: or advice, but just to put that on the table,
Speaker 1: when I say how good are we, I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: how virtuous are we? We have in mind here tends
Speaker 1: to be contemporary people. So I'm not saying throughout history
Speaker 1: tends to be Westerners, because the source of evidence I'm
Speaker 1: drawing on tends to focus on just Western populations, and
Speaker 1: it tends to be adults as opposed to children. And
Speaker 1: then the last part of it is what's the source
Speaker 1: of evidence that I'm going to be using that's where
Speaker 1: you come in. So that's where psychology helps me out.
Speaker 1: Looking at studies that have been done in social and
Speaker 1: personality psychology over the last fifty years or so, roughly speaking,
Speaker 1: which put people into different situations, morally relevant situations. I'm
Speaker 1: looking at moral character here and see how they tend
Speaker 1: to behave Do they cheat or not cheat? Do they
Speaker 1: lie or not lie? Do they steal or not steal?
Speaker 1: Do they help or not help? And so I know
Speaker 1: we can dive into the particular studies. But to tie
Speaker 1: all that together then, using the research that I'm familiar
Speaker 1: with in psychology, which tends to focus on contemporary Western populations,
Speaker 1: and using the ethical standards of virtue and vice, my
Speaker 1: conclusion now, to not evade the question anymore, is that
Speaker 1: most of us are a mixed bag. By that, I
Speaker 1: mean we have some aspects of our character which are
Speaker 1: morally positive and some aspects of our character which are
Speaker 1: morally negative. But in general, most people, I'm not saying
Speaker 1: everyone they're outliers. This is a kind of a Bell
Speaker 1: Care kind of situation. Most people, given my reading of
Speaker 1: the data, have a character which is not good enough
Speaker 1: to count as virtuous. But on the flip side is
Speaker 1: not bad enough to count as vicious, so we're somewhere
Speaker 1: in a murky middle between the two. Yeah, that's so interesting.
Speaker 1: I recently did this paper. We looked at the light
Speaker 1: very dark triad of personality. We created a light triad
Speaker 1: scale to be a nice counterpart to the dark triad scale,
Speaker 1: which consists of psychopathy, Machabeliism, and narcissism. And we found,
Speaker 1: consistent with what you're saying, we looked at a light
Speaker 1: versus dark triad balance within individuals. Okay, calculate, what are
Speaker 1: most people like? They're light and dark force? What is
Speaker 1: it in the average human? And we actually empirically try
Speaker 1: to answer that question, and we found that most people
Speaker 1: are like slightly tipped to the right of lightness. But
Speaker 1: it's like basically empirically confirms exactly what you just said. Okay, okay, great.
Speaker 1: Was that more with self report measures? That was based
Speaker 1: on self report measures, but we also correlated the light
Speaker 1: triad with performance measures of conspicuous consumption and cheating and
Speaker 1: stuff like greed. Greed. Yeah, I look forward to the
Speaker 1: paper and all the support I can guess, you know,
Speaker 1: how welcome. It's great. So what we have lots to
Speaker 1: talk about because you initiate this project called the Character Project,
Speaker 1: I'd like to hear some of the main findings, that mean,
Speaker 1: takeaways from the Character project and who were the sample right?
Speaker 1: So they were in this sample right. So this is
Speaker 1: quite a large project that had many different facets to it.
Speaker 1: So let me kind of paid a picture and then
Speaker 1: we can go in different directions if you like. This
Speaker 1: was a five year project based at wake Forest University
Speaker 1: where I am funded by the Tempton Foundation, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: and it had a component of research at wake Forest,
Speaker 1: and then it had another component which was funding research
Speaker 1: at other universities around the world. So we actually became
Speaker 1: a kind of mini grants making institute ourselves, where we
Speaker 1: had researchers in psychology, philosophy, and theology apply with proposals
Speaker 1: for new and innovative work on the topic of character.
Speaker 1: They applied to us, We had their proposals reviewed and
Speaker 1: funded the best ones we received, so we ended up
Speaker 1: funding twenty eight scholars around the world very interesting products
Speaker 1: and psychology especially. But then also there was the aspect
Speaker 1: of what we did here at wake Forest, and by we,
Speaker 1: I mean myself. I was the one heading it. Up
Speaker 1: in the philosophy department, but with a team of other people,
Speaker 1: including some prominent personality psychologists like William Fleeson, Mike Ferr
Speaker 1: and the rat At Jairokim in our psychology department here.
Speaker 1: So the psychologist here did a number of empirical studies,
Speaker 1: and in my own case, I was doing what I
Speaker 1: wanted to explored a little bit already with you, that
Speaker 1: kind indisciplinary work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology.
Speaker 1: So where philosophy was going to be informing me as
Speaker 1: to what the good life is and what it is
Speaker 1: to be a virtuous person, and then the psychological research
Speaker 1: was going to be informing me as to the extent
Speaker 1: to which people tend to live up to those standards
Speaker 1: of what it is to be a good person. And
Speaker 1: so in my own case that ended up resulting in
Speaker 1: the two academic books that you mentioned, the inn Introduction
Speaker 1: Character in Moral Psychology and Moral Character and Empirical Theory.
Speaker 1: So the overall takeaway, I think, and we can get
Speaker 1: into the specific finding some different projects, the overall takeaways
Speaker 1: that we we really wanted to infuse a lot of
Speaker 1: excitements and energy and resources into the study of character
Speaker 1: in these three disciplines. We thought, you know, there's some
Speaker 1: work going on already, but not much, and we wanted
Speaker 1: to kind of incentivize and get people paying it more
Speaker 1: attention to it. Now that the product is over and
Speaker 1: we've been it's been over for a couple of years now,
Speaker 1: we've seen lots more work coming out in the in
Speaker 1: the area of character and that's one of the great
Speaker 1: rewards that I'm most proud of. That is great. You
Speaker 1: gave really great context behind the study. Did you tell
Speaker 1: me some of the key takeaways of the study? Did
Speaker 1: I miss that? So it's hard to say that there's
Speaker 1: any one study. Okay, So you know I could. We
Speaker 1: had my books, We had the psychology research away for us,
Speaker 1: We had the products that were funded elsewhere. I'll mention,
Speaker 1: how diould I just give you a couple of highlights, Yes,
Speaker 1: the highlight reel. So one psychology product we funded was
Speaker 1: at the University of Barcelona by David Galarda, and he
Speaker 1: was doing a virtual reality simulation of the Molgrim experiments. So,
Speaker 1: since you can't do Mlgrim anymore these days, for you know,
Speaker 1: ethical reasons, he had this committivative thought of using this
Speaker 1: virtual reality lab that he has there to simulate in
Speaker 1: many ways the real study, but without a person quote
Speaker 1: unquote getting the shocks instead of virtual reality avatar who
Speaker 1: was getting the shocks in the in the shops. Is
Speaker 1: that ecologically valid? Well, that's a good good question to
Speaker 1: ask keV. He made the case that it was, and
Speaker 1: that was you know, at the time, this was six
Speaker 1: seven years ago. I was convinced by his arguments, and
Speaker 1: the findings tended to mirror for whatever this is worth,
Speaker 1: tend to mirror those that Milgrim found himself. So roughly
Speaker 1: the same percentage of participants would go up to the
Speaker 1: xxx shock level as compared to those who wouldn't go
Speaker 1: that high. So that's one illustration of the kind of
Speaker 1: product we've studied in psychology. Another one was looking at
Speaker 1: from a developmental perspective at when is there evidence fairness
Speaker 1: norms emerging in young infants? You know, at what stage
Speaker 1: is it can we kind of detect that they pay
Speaker 1: attention to fairness norms And this researcher suggested it could
Speaker 1: be as early as nine months based on her behavioral work.
Speaker 1: A third researcher, Sarah Conrath, was looking at ways to
Speaker 1: encourage empathy. She was using a text message a manipulation
Speaker 1: or I'm sorry intervention to see whether by receiving text
Speaker 1: messages periodically during the day which had empathetic themes to them,
Speaker 1: that might be effective in cultivating empathy in the participants
Speaker 1: and then subsequent leading them to behave better on a
Speaker 1: helping task than a control group which did not receive
Speaker 1: empathy inducing texts, as she found some preliminary evidence that
Speaker 1: was the case. So that's why I struggled when I said,
Speaker 1: when you said, what's the results of the study, you
Speaker 1: are three very different studies with you know, very different
Speaker 1: goals in minds, but all under the broadheading of investigating
Speaker 1: character from them here empirical perspective. Yeah, no, I totally
Speaker 1: hear you. So is our website where people can read
Speaker 1: up about the summaries of all the findings. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1: So we have a website www. The Character Project all
Speaker 1: one word dot com, and we have summaries. We also
Speaker 1: have videos have speaking at a conference the participants and
Speaker 1: summarizing their results, and we have linked to the published
Speaker 1: works as well. So it seems like you're defining character
Speaker 1: as tinged with morality, whereas a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the field of posit psychology, you know, who use the
Speaker 1: via personality strengths inventory. A lot of those character strengths
Speaker 1: are not necessarily tinged with morality. In fact, you could
Speaker 1: have a character strength for let's say authenticity and be
Speaker 1: authentic in being an asshole. Right, So why do you
Speaker 1: choose to define character in the way you have chosen it?
Speaker 1: Do you have criticism on how others have chosen than
Speaker 1: to define it? Yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great, great question.
Speaker 1: So let me be a little clearer, and I think,
Speaker 1: actually I'm going to agree with your points. So one
Speaker 1: broad category here could be personality traits, with under the
Speaker 1: heading of personality traits you might say that one species
Speaker 1: is character traits. And then under the heading up character traits,
Speaker 1: you might say there's one species are moral character traits
Speaker 1: morally relevant character traits. So I do agree that character
Speaker 1: traits are broader than just the morally relevant ones. Some
Speaker 1: people try to classify them and divide them into different kinds. So,
Speaker 1: for example, some people say that there are epistemic character traits,
Speaker 1: those character traits that have to do with theoretical inquiry,
Speaker 1: theoretical knowledge and wisdom and understanding and the like. Others
Speaker 1: will say that there are character traits associated with aesthetics
Speaker 1: and beauty, others character traits associated with athletics. And then
Speaker 1: they are the moral ones too, So I don't mean
Speaker 1: to conflate character traits. It's just with the moral ones.
Speaker 1: I think that's quite right to say that they're a
Speaker 1: kind of character trait. For me, I just chose on
Speaker 1: my own research to focus on the morally ones, morally
Speaker 1: relevant ones. I had to start somewhere. I'm an ethics professor,
Speaker 1: That's what I do, so you know, it seems natural
Speaker 1: to start with those. So when I say things like
Speaker 1: most people's characters is neither virtuos or vicious. What I
Speaker 1: mean here is moral character. I'm speaking to that specifically,
Speaker 1: and I think that's a pretty common approach to take.
Speaker 1: I think so as well, Yeah, let's talk philosophically about
Speaker 1: definitions here. In boundary conditions, can we precisely delineate where
Speaker 1: something is fits within the realm of a character trait
Speaker 1: personality trait versus a non character personality trait? So are
Speaker 1: the Big five? They're not usually treated as character traits. Well, philosophically,
Speaker 1: why not? Can you justify or explain to me why
Speaker 1: extroversion introversion dimension of personality is not a character dimension.
Speaker 1: But let's say bravery non bravery is, and doesn't it
Speaker 1: get murky when you start to like really think about
Speaker 1: it and I realize that bravery is strongly correlated with
Speaker 1: extra versions. So in a sense, you are saying that
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, do you see I'm saying it? I
Speaker 1: surely do so. I don't know if I can give
Speaker 1: you what you wants, but here are some fossomies. One
Speaker 1: thought is that when people say that, you know, the
Speaker 1: Big Five are not dealing with character, what they typically
Speaker 1: means moral character here. So they're saying that there are
Speaker 1: Big Five traits and they're fastest. And then they'll say
Speaker 1: there's more character traits. And then they'll say, well, we
Speaker 1: don't see much more character in the Big five. Maybe
Speaker 1: under agreeable to us, we might say there's modesty and
Speaker 1: maybe there's some helping going on, but by and March,
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to be much more character in the
Speaker 1: Big Five. Or it's face it's on a surface reading,
Speaker 1: and that's I think a fair point to make. But
Speaker 1: there's a deeper question that you're asking here, which is,
Speaker 1: can we could give a precise criteria to distinguish, say,
Speaker 1: moral character on the one side, from non moral personality
Speaker 1: on the other. I don't know if we can, but
Speaker 1: I'll at least mention one or two attempts. So one
Speaker 1: attempt is to focus on the topic of responsibility. I
Speaker 1: had to say that our character traits are those for
Speaker 1: which it's appropriate to hold someone morally responsible or not,
Speaker 1: Whereas when we think about other personality traits moral character traits,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't necessarily have to hold someone responsible for possessing them.
Speaker 1: So to take your example, someone's level of extraversion or introversion,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't seem to be appropriate to hold someone more
Speaker 1: responsible for that, But someone's level of honesty or compassion,
Speaker 1: or maybe even the temperance, it would be appropriate to
Speaker 1: hold someone responsible for those traits. So I'm not saying
Speaker 1: this is a perfect proposal, but I'm saying it's one
Speaker 1: that's out there that's been proposed to draw this kind
Speaker 1: of criteria. I'm trying to, Okay, I'm trying to like
Speaker 1: run my head around that. So it gets tricky when
Speaker 1: you like with the VIA twenty four character strengths, some
Speaker 1: of them are treated as independent of each other. And
Speaker 1: what gets tricky about that is if you're extroverted, you're
Speaker 1: probably going to be more likely to, like, I'm really
Speaker 1: trying to think that the relationship between personality and character strengths.
Speaker 1: So if you're more extroverted, you're going to be like,
Speaker 1: much more likely to report zest as one of your
Speaker 1: character strengths. If you're more introverted, you're going to be
Speaker 1: more likely to select humility. If we found this in
Speaker 1: our own research we did with Susan Kane and some
Speaker 1: other particular subset of character strengths. So yet when we
Speaker 1: look at the Big Five, you know, we'll say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's a distinction here between personality and character. You know,
Speaker 1: like the introverse and extraversion dimension is amoral. But we
Speaker 1: actually have on the VIA, we have different sources of
Speaker 1: very a that can kind of actually conflict, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's problematic at all. So you're thinking
Speaker 1: that in the case of the VIA, what's looked like
Speaker 1: perhaps some non moral traits do tend to be strongly
Speaker 1: correlated with some relatively uncontroversial moral traits, and so it's
Speaker 1: hard to draw any sharp boundaries in a classification. I
Speaker 1: don't know what I'm really saying, because I love the
Speaker 1: VIA in the sense that I found it really useful
Speaker 1: for a lot of people to take it and find
Speaker 1: their top strengths. You know, so much of life and
Speaker 1: self actualization, in my view, is helping people find how
Speaker 1: they want to live their own best life in their
Speaker 1: own way without giving them, you know, their own sort
Speaker 1: of like you know rules, and they have to kind
Speaker 1: of discover that and discover it for themselves. And that
Speaker 1: the VIA is a nice way to help people discover
Speaker 1: some sides in themselves. But it's a you know, maybe
Speaker 1: it's just too and being too pedantic and trying to
Speaker 1: think through, well, what is a absolutely non character personality trait,
Speaker 1: you know, and like why is zest a character trait
Speaker 1: when it's essentially big five extraversion or one facet of extraversion.
Speaker 1: I mean it is zest is almost perfect correlated with
Speaker 1: positive enthusiasm, which is one of the two mean enough
Speaker 1: aspects of extraversion. Yeah, so I wonder this is maybe
Speaker 1: just getting semantic at this point. It might be, and
Speaker 1: I might be way too being way too bedanced, even
Speaker 1: more so than a philosopher. So I mean, it was
Speaker 1: called the character strengths, the twenty four character strengths. I
Speaker 1: wonder how much is packed into the notion of character
Speaker 1: there in character strengths. I mean, another way to think
Speaker 1: about this that might be helpful is, you know, if
Speaker 1: we're thinking about is something a part of moral character
Speaker 1: and not? Can we kind of draw boundaries around the
Speaker 1: realm of moral character? Well, take a given trait and
Speaker 1: vary it, strengthen it or weakness. Does that change our
Speaker 1: moral assessment of the person or not? For something like zess,
Speaker 1: I would think that initially the answer would be no.
Speaker 1: I mean, increase someone's astor you decrease someone's ess. That's
Speaker 1: not going to change how I would morally assess or
Speaker 1: appraise the person. Would you take somebody like honesty and
Speaker 1: increase someone's honesty or decrease someone's honesty, That does change
Speaker 1: my overall assessment of the morality of that person's character.
Speaker 1: So that might be another way to helpfully think about
Speaker 1: drawing trying to draw the boundaries of moral character. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I hear what you're saying. Within the character strengths space,
Speaker 1: there's a subset that are related to moral character. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's all You're really saying yeah, no, it makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. I'm going to move on from my
Speaker 1: pedanticism and ask you, you know you looked at what
Speaker 1: our character looks like today in various dimensions helping, harming, lying,
Speaker 1: and cheating. Can we talk about them? Can we quite
Speaker 1: start with helping? You know, where are people at these days?
Speaker 1: And in terms of helping? Sure? So figure that out
Speaker 1: from the armchair, And my philosopher, I like to do
Speaker 1: things from the armchair. Would be great if I could
Speaker 1: arrive at all these answers without having to get way
Speaker 1: into the empirical lature. But for something like that, I
Speaker 1: need the empirical lature. So I would look at, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, studies which found that people didn't help
Speaker 1: very much, and I would then, on the other had
Speaker 1: look at studies which kound of people helps quite a bit,
Speaker 1: and I would kind of examine what factors would predict
Speaker 1: whether the participants would tend to help or not. So
Speaker 1: my ultimate goal there is to think are people helping?
Speaker 1: Is people's helping tracking the morally relevant considerations or not?
Speaker 1: Are people helping in light of the the correct moral considerations?
Speaker 1: And are they not helping in light of the correct
Speaker 1: moral considerations or not. That's the abstract answer. Now to
Speaker 1: get into some of the specifics, So I'll give you
Speaker 1: two studies on opposite ends of the spectrum. On the
Speaker 1: one hand, we have something like group effect studies where
Speaker 1: you know, to take one of the classic examples, lady
Speaker 1: in the stress, sixty nine participants come into the lab.
Speaker 1: One of the time, they go into room they told
Speaker 1: the toll out the survey. A stranger joins him in
Speaker 1: the room filling out the survey. So the two of
Speaker 1: them are hard at work. The person in charge, he
Speaker 1: gave them the survey, leaves, goes into the next room.
Speaker 1: A few minutes later, there's a loud crash and the
Speaker 1: screams of pain and crying and say my leg, my
Speaker 1: leg out out ouch, and you know what happens. Subsequently,
Speaker 1: the question is did the participants do anything to help,
Speaker 1: you know, cry out, can I get someone to help
Speaker 1: you or run into the next room or not. And
Speaker 1: it seemed like if it was a it seems to
Speaker 1: me like if it was a compassionate person, highly burcherous person,
Speaker 1: they would tend to help, and they're helping wouldn't vary
Speaker 1: as a function of what the stranger with them did
Speaker 1: but lo and behold it. For actual participants it did
Speaker 1: vary considerably. So if the stranger with them does nothing,
Speaker 1: this keeps working on the survey as if there's no
Speaker 1: emergency at all. By large, this is no new news
Speaker 1: is very famous research. By large, the participants won't help either.
Speaker 1: So in that particular study, only seven percent of participants
Speaker 1: did anything at all to help, as compared to another
Speaker 1: version where they were alone with no stranger at all,
Speaker 1: and in that version seventy percent helps. So it seemed
Speaker 1: like their behavior was quite sensitive to what another person
Speaker 1: in the room was doing. And in particular, the underlying
Speaker 1: story has to do with factors of embarrassment fear of embarrassment,
Speaker 1: and that's the most important moral considerations. So that seems
Speaker 1: to me to reflect somewhat badly on character. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: draw grandiose lessons from that. One study doesn't prove anything here.
Speaker 1: I'm just giving you a kind of an illustration of
Speaker 1: one of the more depressing or disappointing results that I
Speaker 1: came across on the flip side with helping. I'm really
Speaker 1: impressed with the work of Daniel Batson, who was like
Speaker 1: asas for most of his career and is one of
Speaker 1: the lead leading researchers on the topic of empathy and helping.
Speaker 1: It's long been known that when you increase participants empathy,
Speaker 1: they subsequently are much more likely to help this empathy
Speaker 1: helping relationship. That's no big discovery, but that's in you know.
Speaker 1: One of his claims to fame in the research world
Speaker 1: is to try and come up with an explanatory hypothesis
Speaker 1: for why empathy tends to lead to higher levels of
Speaker 1: helping behavior. And his proposal, and the empathy altruism hypothesis,
Speaker 1: proposes that the motivation that's induced by feeling empathy is
Speaker 1: genuinely altruistic. Motivation is motivation concerned with benefiting others for
Speaker 1: their own sake, independent of whether I, the actor benefit
Speaker 1: or not. So in one of his studies, he had
Speaker 1: the these are college students, they had an opportunity to
Speaker 1: help of what they were told was a fellow member
Speaker 1: of their university they never come across, and who had
Speaker 1: been in a terrible car wreck and in need of
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of health in order to be able
Speaker 1: to graduate from the university. And it's cut through the
Speaker 1: details just to get to the punchline control subjects by
Speaker 1: and large did not sign up to help. Those who
Speaker 1: would be given a different two sentence manipulation in the instructions,
Speaker 1: by and large did sign up to help this Katie Banks,
Speaker 1: this fellow allegedly fellow student at the university, and then
Speaker 1: at Bason's right. Not only are they acting more helpfully
Speaker 1: because of the empathy manipulation, but their motivation to help
Speaker 1: is altruistic. That's the kind of motivation I would expect
Speaker 1: of a virtuous person, of a compassionate person in particular,
Speaker 1: So to summarize and then stop. When I looked at
Speaker 1: this licture and helping, I saw two kind of suck
Speaker 1: sides of it. I have more discouraging side where there's
Speaker 1: evidence of lack of helping, not for very good reasons,
Speaker 1: and a more positive side whereas evidence of helping and
Speaker 1: some cases when it's empathetic helping for quite good reasons.
Speaker 1: And so no surprise than at that point I drew
Speaker 1: the conclusion that were a rather mixed bag in between
Speaker 1: the polls of virtue, advice or in this case, compassion
Speaker 1: and callousness. Sure, how much did you look individual difference moderators?
Speaker 1: Very little tell me more about why I probably should have. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm a personality researcher, so you know, like clearly certainly
Speaker 1: make conclusions about humans on average. But you know, there's
Speaker 1: certain people who are persistently, consistently more along the lines
Speaker 1: of the antagonism spectrum, and there are those who are
Speaker 1: more agreeable, and yeah, that has a lot of predictive
Speaker 1: value as well. Yeah. Yeah, So I mean two things. One,
Speaker 1: I'm not conducting the studies myself. Again, I'm a phlosopher
Speaker 1: reading the research, so I'm kind of relying on what
Speaker 1: the studies themselves did in terms of measuring individ digital differences.
Speaker 1: But then secondly, my view, and I really want to
Speaker 1: stress this because sometimes they can come across as I'm
Speaker 1: just lumping everyone into one box and saying, well, in
Speaker 1: this kind of situation, you know, everyone's gonna behave this way,
Speaker 1: and this other situation, everyone's gon to behave this other way. No,
Speaker 1: I mean that never turned out to be the case
Speaker 1: in the individual situations. There were always individual differences in
Speaker 1: the behavior that was found. And my own you know,
Speaker 1: overall view here is that there's going to be a spectrum,
Speaker 1: So there's going to be you know, if we're comfortable
Speaker 1: with categorical labels here, which sometimes we're not fine, especially
Speaker 1: talking to psychologists who are comfortable with categorical label labels. Here,
Speaker 1: there's the virtue side of things, there's the vice side
Speaker 1: of things. There's this middle space in between virtue advice
Speaker 1: or using the example I just had, compassion and callousness,
Speaker 1: and my reading of the liture, my takeaway is asked,
Speaker 1: while many people are in the space middle space, not
Speaker 1: all are. They're going to be outliers on both ends.
Speaker 1: So you're going to have, you know, your your Hitler's
Speaker 1: on the one end, You're going to have your Gandhi's
Speaker 1: on the other. And that's why the cover of the
Speaker 1: the latest book, the Character Gap has you know, precisely
Speaker 1: on the cover Gandhi on the top and Hitler on
Speaker 1: the bottom. So just emphasize that it's not all just
Speaker 1: monolithic here. There's a nice or I think it's possible
Speaker 1: to think that people fall on a spectrum of virtue
Speaker 1: and vice. Gotcha, Okay, so what about harming? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: same kind of story here, So it follows the same
Speaker 1: kind of scripts, but I use different examples. So the
Speaker 1: main one that I focus on this you know, in
Speaker 1: this element of my research and in learn about in
Speaker 1: the character gap, the trade books, the Pilgrim experiment, so
Speaker 1: you know, don't have to say much about that for
Speaker 1: your listeners. But interestingly, even in the Milgram experiments, it's
Speaker 1: not I don't think the right lesson to draw is
Speaker 1: a really pessimistic, negative, vicious kind of conclusion. Some people
Speaker 1: do draw that and they see, wow, you know, these
Speaker 1: participants came in here and within the span of this
Speaker 1: one session, they essentially were willing to kill an is
Speaker 1: in person and it's a stranger. Boy. Isn't that just
Speaker 1: a bad reflection on their character? Aren't they, you know, vicious?
Speaker 1: And if we're like them, aren't we vicious too? In
Speaker 1: this in this context, aren't we malevolent or cruel or
Speaker 1: or a little like of that? So it's easy to
Speaker 1: take the I think a lot of this harming lature
Speaker 1: in that direction, in a more pessimistic direction. So maybe
Speaker 1: it's worth to highlight kind of counterbalance that with Even
Speaker 1: in Milgram, there's it's a mixed bag. So you know,
Speaker 1: famously he had other variations rather than the one that
Speaker 1: you know most intro students encounter. So you get variations
Speaker 1: where they're was no authority figure, or he had variations
Speaker 1: where there was a conflicting instruction from the authority figure,
Speaker 1: or the variations where there was authority figure but not
Speaker 1: in the same room. And what we see and notice
Speaker 1: many of those variations is that the shock level goes
Speaker 1: way down. In other words, participants aren't nearly as inclined
Speaker 1: to turn the dial up and up and up and
Speaker 1: up up to the xxx level, and in many cases
Speaker 1: they keep it at a very moderate, moderate level. So
Speaker 1: that's that's one point. Even though they had free reign,
Speaker 1: it was up to them, they could have, you know,
Speaker 1: continued on to the xxx level and these other vasis
Speaker 1: if they still choose chose to do so. They tended
Speaker 1: not to choose to do so. And then there's a
Speaker 1: second point to make here, which is that even in
Speaker 1: the famous version, it's not as if, as far as
Speaker 1: we can tell, the participants were kind of wholeheartedly on
Speaker 1: board with what they were doing. They would need to
Speaker 1: be if they were vicious, because one aspect of advice
Speaker 1: is a wholehearted motivation. A lack of conflict in one's motivation,
Speaker 1: so one's beliefs and desires and feelings and so forth
Speaker 1: line up in a certain direction. And that's also true
Speaker 1: of a virtue too. A virtuous person is wholehearted. So
Speaker 1: if that's right, then we would need to see that
Speaker 1: in participants in the Milgram study to draw the conclusion
Speaker 1: that they were cruel or or you know, any other
Speaker 1: label you wanted to use. As far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: we didn't see that. What I said we saw was
Speaker 1: evidence of conflict of internal stress. Sometimes even the external
Speaker 1: evidence like sweating and you know, shaking and nervousness and
Speaker 1: this kind of thing, which would suggest a deep internal
Speaker 1: conflicting's going on. And that's what you would expect the
Speaker 1: psychological profile vicious person to be. M Yeah, so interesting.
Speaker 1: And then seria similar findings for lying and cheating the
Speaker 1: same pattern. But I think some really cool innovative studies.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll just pick up on the cheating for one
Speaker 1: more illustration. Those examples I gave you from harming and
Speaker 1: helping tended to be older examples, not to take anything
Speaker 1: away from them. But in the case of cheating, there's
Speaker 1: this body of research in the last ten years. It
Speaker 1: uses a certain kind of paradigm to investigate the level
Speaker 1: of honesty and the participants when it goes as follows.
Speaker 1: You have a control group. They're taking a test with
Speaker 1: twenty problems. They're told that they're going to be paid,
Speaker 1: say fifty cents per correct answer on the test. In
Speaker 1: this control condition, they just work as hard as they can.
Speaker 1: They turn their answers, the authority figure with the experiment
Speaker 1: or whoever it is in charge, graise the test and
Speaker 1: pays them according So there's an opportunity to a cheat.
Speaker 1: But then there's this other variation where now called the
Speaker 1: shredder condition, very similar in some ways fifty cents per
Speaker 1: correct answer, same tests, different participants, but the key variation
Speaker 1: is that they're told after they take the test that
Speaker 1: they will be the ones to grade the test themselves.
Speaker 1: They'll then just be told they're told their materials will
Speaker 1: be shredded or destroyed, and they can just verbally report
Speaker 1: how many they got correct correct in quotation marks. So
Speaker 1: we should keep in mind, and so this provides space
Speaker 1: to cheat if one wants to, and get away with
Speaker 1: it if one wants to. So. Naturally, in many context
Speaker 1: people don't cheat because they're afraid of getting caught and
Speaker 1: the punishment might come with it. But in this context
Speaker 1: you can cheat if you want to and get away
Speaker 1: with it, no questions asked, or so one might think, so,
Speaker 1: and what are the results there? It tends to be
Speaker 1: that controls, you know, it depends. It varies from various
Speaker 1: study to study. You know, one study seven correct out
Speaker 1: of twenty different group. Now the shredder condition for this
Speaker 1: particular study, fourteen correct in quotation marks that we should
Speaker 1: say correct in that shredder condition for that particular study,
Speaker 1: so double Now is it because that this second group
Speaker 1: was just so much smarter. They did so much you know,
Speaker 1: they were really really good at that test, and so
Speaker 1: that's why they got fourteen right as supposed to seen.
Speaker 1: You know, that's possible, but I'm not going to wager
Speaker 1: any money on that. I'm not going to buy that explanation.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna buy the other natural explanation that they probably
Speaker 1: saw an opportunity to make some money. And then it
Speaker 1: goes on from there, because again, this might give you
Speaker 1: some pessimistic conclusions, right, or it leads you in a
Speaker 1: pessimistic direction. Yeah, oh boy. I might have thought people
Speaker 1: were honest, but then I see this study, and now
Speaker 1: I'm thinking a lot of people are dishonest. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: first of all, don't throw any big conclusions from one study.
Speaker 1: But secondly they are now interesting spinoffs and in variations,
Speaker 1: in iterations of it. So I'll just mention one more.
Speaker 1: You can do the same thing, but where by the
Speaker 1: same thing, I mean, have this shred air condition set up,
Speaker 1: but do it at a university with an honor code.
Speaker 1: Where for example, my university, Wake Forest, we have ant
Speaker 1: code here. And so what happens if before they take
Speaker 1: the test, the participants in this case would it be
Speaker 1: college students sign the university's utter code. Then they take
Speaker 1: the test, same tests, same fifty percent fifty cents correct
Speaker 1: answer incentive, and same opportunity to cheat if you want to,
Speaker 1: because your answer kee is going to be treaded. Well.
Speaker 1: In this one study, cheating disappeared. The average performance went
Speaker 1: back down to the control levels. So I see something
Speaker 1: like that and I say, oh, well, wait a minute here,
Speaker 1: that's a little bit different than I would expect of
Speaker 1: a dishonest person. I would expect a dishonest person to
Speaker 1: maybe sign the outer code as a formality. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: of course I gotta do. Everyone else is doing that,
Speaker 1: But then turn around and cheat, take advantage of the
Speaker 1: same opportunity to cheat that they would have had without
Speaker 1: the honor code on a code. But I loaned behole.
Speaker 1: That's not at least this one study suggests that's not
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. Of course, we need to see
Speaker 1: some application, uh too. Wow, So there's hope for humanity?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean there's a hope if you have
Speaker 1: an assumption working in the back of the discussion. So
Speaker 1: right now, the picture I've articulated is one where we've
Speaker 1: kind of got a mixed character. I'm what I call
Speaker 1: a mix character, kind of mixed bag. There's hope there
Speaker 1: in the sense that we're not as bad as we
Speaker 1: could be. But there's also, you know, disappointment in that
Speaker 1: we're not nearly as good as we should be. But
Speaker 1: there's another discussion of hope here, which is about change. Right.
Speaker 1: Is there any hope even if we are a mixed
Speaker 1: bag or tend to be like myself included? Is there
Speaker 1: any hope to be found in moving the needle to
Speaker 1: try and get better and get closer to that that
Speaker 1: ideal of virtue? And this will rely on an assumption
Speaker 1: that personality is malleable, all right, And I know you've
Speaker 1: you've argue that it is. I've everything I've read suggested
Speaker 1: it is. Philosophers, you know, going all o back to
Speaker 1: play an Arisoto IV always thought that that personality is valuable.
Speaker 1: By that, I mean it can change, even if it's
Speaker 1: not going to be overnight or you know some magic
Speaker 1: pillaring like that, slow gradual change is possible. So if
Speaker 1: we take that assumption and combine it with this mixed
Speaker 1: bag idea, then you know, I think that the natural
Speaker 1: question I ask is, will are there any strategies or
Speaker 1: steps or you know, approaches we can adopt to gradually,
Speaker 1: slowly change in the right direction. Good question. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I have some things I might say about that. You know,
Speaker 1: first all I hope so you know, it would be
Speaker 1: a real shame with aren't right. I mean, we just said, oh, here, here,
Speaker 1: here's how things are. And oh and by the way,
Speaker 1: your personality and you know, specifically your character can change.
Speaker 1: But you know, good luck, we'll figure it out. But
Speaker 1: I think there are there are some ideas that do
Speaker 1: show some promise. When I want to carefully kind of qualify,
Speaker 1: I don't saying they're they're you know, they're infallible, or
Speaker 1: they're guaranteed to produce results anything like that. So in
Speaker 1: the last part of the trade book Character Gap, I
Speaker 1: go over about six or seven such strategies, and some
Speaker 1: of them I say, they don't look very promising to me. So,
Speaker 1: for example, the strategy of labeling people as virtuous even
Speaker 1: if you don't think they are. That's that's a strategy.
Speaker 1: You know, you could say to kids or to adults,
Speaker 1: you know, you know you're a really capassionate person, or
Speaker 1: you're a really you know, courageous person, even though you
Speaker 1: don't think. That's just in the hope of getting them
Speaker 1: to accept that label about themselves and then try to
Speaker 1: conform their behavior more to that label. That's that is
Speaker 1: an actual strategy out there. It's been discussed. I'm not
Speaker 1: so positive about that one. I can I can elaborate
Speaker 1: if you like, but just to give you to throw
Speaker 1: one out there, I go on though, and isolate a
Speaker 1: couple of strategies that I think are more promising. So
Speaker 1: one has to do with more and again I'm focusing
Speaker 1: on more character, more role models, exemplars, heroes, saints and
Speaker 1: the like of that. Whether these are fictional like Priest
Speaker 1: and le Mis, or whether they're actual people, whether they're
Speaker 1: more historical actual people are like Abraham Lincoln, HARREYT. Tubman,
Speaker 1: or whether they are contemporary people, whether they're like prominent
Speaker 1: in society, or whether they are neighbor next door. You know,
Speaker 1: there are different variations or different ways this can go.
Speaker 1: But the bazing idea is if we come to admire
Speaker 1: someone for their honesty, let's say, and at admiration at
Speaker 1: emotion of admiration inspires in us a desire to emulate them,
Speaker 1: to try to become more like them. But I talked
Speaker 1: about is this feeling of elevation that could lead over
Speaker 1: time the hope is to gradually becoming more like them. Right,
Speaker 1: So if I admire Lincoln for his honesty and that
Speaker 1: inspires in me a desire to become more like him,
Speaker 1: to emulate him for his honesty, then over time, when
Speaker 1: I'm confronted with different situations, I could try to think,
Speaker 1: you know, what might he do in this situation? Or
Speaker 1: how can I be be like more like Lincoln in
Speaker 1: this situation? And can be an aspirite aspirational aim that
Speaker 1: I gradually get closer and closer to approximating. So I
Speaker 1: could say more about that. That's just one example, I'll
Speaker 1: give you give you one other one of a strategy
Speaker 1: that I think shows some promise, and that's educating ourselves
Speaker 1: more about some of the tendencies that we tend to
Speaker 1: have in opposition to virtue that hold us back from
Speaker 1: being virtuous. So we mentioned already, for example, the group
Speaker 1: effect and how in groups, even when an emergency is
Speaker 1: going on, and we it's fairly clear that emergency is
Speaker 1: going on, people sometimes don't help. Well, that's striking, it's
Speaker 1: surprising too many. You know, you asked lay people, what
Speaker 1: would you predict, what happened, what would you pick you
Speaker 1: would do in that situation, and you know, overwhelmingly people
Speaker 1: say I would help or the group would happen. And
Speaker 1: often that doesn't manifest itself. Why. Well, one leading explanation
Speaker 1: is that we are quite moved by considerations of embarrassments
Speaker 1: more than we realize. Where we have this fear of
Speaker 1: embarrassing ourselves in group contexts, and that can hold us
Speaker 1: back and restrict us from doing the right thing, in
Speaker 1: this case, helping a stranger in an emergency. Well, what
Speaker 1: if we became more aware that, what if we learned
Speaker 1: about some of the research or became more introspective or
Speaker 1: you know, I discovered some of these tendencies about ourselves,
Speaker 1: so we're just aware of them in the first place,
Speaker 1: and then in situations where they might come into a play,
Speaker 1: we can counterbalance them, We can hold them in check.
Speaker 1: So if you know, in the future, when situation where
Speaker 1: someone needs help anywhere in a group context, and I
Speaker 1: feel myself holding back and being reticent, I can also
Speaker 1: reund myself, why is this really worth me blending into
Speaker 1: the crowd? Or should I step up? Is there any
Speaker 1: good reason not to step up in that situation and
Speaker 1: do the right thing. So role models seem promising, and
Speaker 1: what I call getting the word out and learning more
Speaker 1: about our tendencies which hold us back seems promising as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that could be incorporated into education. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: both could be, and both in some cases are Some
Speaker 1: schools do this intentionally. I mean, in one sense, the
Speaker 1: role modeling is happening already across the board, whether we
Speaker 1: think about it or not. I mean, teachers already are
Speaker 1: serving as role models, and the values that they're espousing
Speaker 1: to their students and the way they're living their lives
Speaker 1: in front of their students is serving a role modeling function,
Speaker 1: even if the school of staff or the teacher particular
Speaker 1: never gave any thoughts to character model in the first place.
Speaker 1: So I love that. Yeah, I love that. I try
Speaker 1: my best to model for students the characteristics that I
Speaker 1: want them to try to develop. But it's not easy, right, right,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not easy, especially when students are not
Speaker 1: there yet and they're not modeling it back, right, it
Speaker 1: can be very hard to remain at a sort of
Speaker 1: higher level of wisdom and compassion and loving kindness when
Speaker 1: someone's not showing that in return. It's right, You're absolutely rights.
Speaker 1: And I try to do the same thing myself in
Speaker 1: a variety of different contexts. So I try to do
Speaker 1: that with my students. I also have young children, so
Speaker 1: sometimes they're the same thing sometimes university here. But I
Speaker 1: also try and do it, you know, I discipline so
Speaker 1: in my marriage. You know, there are lots of times
Speaker 1: when I'm trying to live out what I care about,
Speaker 1: but while acknowledging that I have a lot of room
Speaker 1: to grow and I'm a very flawed, mixed bag myself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so well, you know it's interesting. I mean, yeah, welcome
Speaker 1: the club. But I've been thinking about individual differences, and
Speaker 1: I feel like there's like three lateent classes of that
Speaker 1: we could identify. And I've been thinking about constructing a
Speaker 1: scale to get at this, and I don't think anyone's
Speaker 1: ever gone in this, but let me know if you
Speaker 1: think this makes any sense. It feels like there are
Speaker 1: people who have more of a conflict between the dark
Speaker 1: and light forces within. There are those that seem to
Speaker 1: have accepted their dark side and embrace it almost fully,
Speaker 1: and there are those that are more unleashed on the
Speaker 1: light side and just don't have as much of the
Speaker 1: conflicts in their daily life, Like they're not constantly battling,
Speaker 1: you know, should I be a nice person or shouldn't
Speaker 1: It just comes more naturally then that. Of course I
Speaker 1: want to. I have the empathy, So I don't think
Speaker 1: anyone's really done a good job capturing the like the
Speaker 1: conflict of the force as an individual difference is variable.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, yeah, but you you'll find plenty of resources
Speaker 1: in philosophy of course, of the the human history. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of stories yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, great
Speaker 1: great empirical story, I mean stories about history. There's also
Speaker 1: just a great conceptional work by philosophers too. So I mean,
Speaker 1: one way to describe what you're saying there is what's
Speaker 1: Aristotle used as his taxonomy of character. So for Aristotle
Speaker 1: he had four. This is simplifying, and he had he
Speaker 1: had more than four, but let's just let's just keep it,
Speaker 1: keep it simple. Initially, you have four categories of character.
Speaker 1: He had virtue, he had continence or strength of will,
Speaker 1: incontinence or weakness of will, and advice, and so you
Speaker 1: you have three categories there. But interestingly, the virtue that's
Speaker 1: wholeheardly oriented towards the lights, to use your terminology, there's
Speaker 1: no conflict in the virtuous person, the whole hardly oriented
Speaker 1: in a sortain direction. The vicious person certainly is whole
Speaker 1: hardly oriented, but of course in the opposite direction, towards
Speaker 1: the dark. And then for the continent. And in kind
Speaker 1: of what they have in common, they're both conflicted, and
Speaker 1: of course is how they resolve the conflict, right, And
Speaker 1: that's right, Hey, kind of power comes in as another
Speaker 1: moderator there. Yeah, But so the kind of person resolves
Speaker 1: the conflict in favor of the right thing. The kind
Speaker 1: of person resolves the conflict in favor of the wrong
Speaker 1: thing or the bad thing, but they're both conflicted, so
Speaker 1: in a sense, you and Aristotle seem to be on
Speaker 1: the same page. Oh, let's end on that note. Let's
Speaker 1: let that sit there for eternity. Hey, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for talking with me today and for your real pioneer,
Speaker 1: truly pioneering work integrating pub psychology and philosophy. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for having me on. I really enjoyed our
Speaker 1: conversation me too. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to
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