12
Shame and guilt, or contempt and anger, differ in that the first emotion in each pair targets a person's character and the second some action by the person (Chapter 8). Similarly, pridefulness rests on the belief that one is a superior person, and pride on the belief that one has performed some outstanding deed. But when we blame or praise an action, is it not because we believe it reflects the agent's character? To what other factor could it be ascribed?
When folk psychology goes wrong
This book is mostly not about praise or blame, but about the explanation of behavior. In this context, the question is the power of character to explain action. People are often assumed to have personality traits (introvert, timid, etc.) as well as virtues (honesty, courage, etc.) or vices (the seven deadly sins, etc.). In folk psychology, these features are assumed to be stable over time and across situations. Proverbs in all languages testify to this assumption. “Who tells one lie will tell a hundred.” “Who lies also steals.” “Who steals an egg will steal an ox.” “Who keeps faith in small matters, does so in large ones.” “Who is caught red-handed once will always be distrusted.”1 If folk psychology is right, predicting and explaining behavior should be easy. A single action will reveal the underlying trait or disposition and allow us to predict behavior on an indefinite number of other occasions when the disposition could manifest itself. The procedure is not tautological, as it would be if we took cheating on an exam as evidence of dishonesty and then used the trait of dishonesty to explain the cheating. Instead, it amounts to using cheating on an exam as evidence for a trait (dishonesty) that will also cause the person to be unfaithful to a spouse. If one accepts the more extreme folk theory that all virtues go together, the cheating might also be used to predict cowardice in battle or excessive drinking.
People often make strong inferences from the austere private conduct of others. The British politician George Lansbury had a favorable impression of Hitler, based on the fact that “he has no love of show or pomp, is a total abstainer, non-smoker, vegetarian, and lives in the country rather than in a town. He is a bachelor, and likes children and old people.” A member of the French Academy reportedly voted for de Gaulle because of the dignity of his private life, with the tacit premise that someone who would betray his wife is also likely to betray his country. In Vietnam, Communist leaders were able to win “the minds and the hearts of the population” because of their incorruptible personal style, in stark contrast to the less self-denying organizers from other political groups. Among the Mafiosi, having affairs is thought to be a sign of a disorderly and weak character.
Judging from the forensic speeches they left us, the ancient Greeks were strong believers in the unity and cross-situational consistency of character. A typical defense against an accusation was not “He did not do it,” but “Given his excellent character as shown by his behavior on other occasions, he could not have done it.” As one historian writes, “Witnesses are known to lie; they are not impartial observers, but in Euripides’ words, competitors, who testify in support of the party that calls them. On the other hand, a man's deeds and associations are (at least in principle) known to the community in which he lives and are thought to reveal his true character.” In discussing fourteen (!) arguments that were propagated at the time for the complicity of Queen Mary of Scots in the assassination of Lord Darnley, Hume cites one counterargument and its rebuttal: “That the only circumstance, which opposed all these presumptions or rather proofs, was, the benignity and goodness of her preceding behaviour, which seemed to remove her from all suspicions of such atrocious inhumanity; but that the characters of men were extremely variable, and persons, guilty of the worst actions, were not always naturally of the worst and most criminal dispositions.” Although Hume does not say so, I conjecture that he endorsed the rebuttal.
To some extent, folk psychology is self-fulfilling. If people believe that others will predict their behavior in a situation of type A on the basis of their behavior in a situation of type B, they will act in situation B with situation A in mind. If the belief in a link between private and public morality is widespread (and known to be so), it creates an incentive for politicians to behave honestly in private life, assuming that any misbehavior would be made known to the electorate. Or suppose that it is widely believed that people have the same rate of time discounting in all situations. If they care too little about their future to take care of their bodies, they are also (according to folk psychology) likely to break a promise to realize a large short-term gain. Hence to be able to make credible promises about mutually profitable long-term cooperation, one should also cultivate a slim and healthy appearance.
To a larger extent, however, folk psychology is demonstrably false.2 If one can eliminate the effects of folk psychology itself, so that there is no incentive to live up to expectations of cross-situational consistency, little consistency is found. Parents who only observe the behavior of their children at home are routinely surprised to learn that they are much more well behaved at school or when visiting the homes of classmates. Moreover, interventions to improve behavior in the family do not lead to improved adjustment at school, compared to that of control groups that received no intervention.3 In laboratory experiments, most people (about two-thirds of the subjects) can be induced to behave heartlessly, to the point of imposing (what they believe to be) severe electrical shocks (about 450 volts) on a confederate of the experimenter. Yet there is no reason to believe that their behavior is due to an underlying trait of sadism, cruelty, or indifference to the suffering of others; in fact, many of the subjects who behaved in this way were upset and torn by what they were doing. Children are much more willing to wait for a larger delayed reward when both that reward and a smaller one that could be obtained immediately are hidden from sight. Any academic will know other academics who are conscientious in their research, but less so in their teaching or in their administrative tasks. Being talkative at lunch turns out to be poorly correlated with talkativeness on other occasions. A person may procrastinate in cleaning up the house but never on the job.4
In an essay “On the inconstancy of our actions,” Montaigne contrasts the behavior of the younger Cato with that of ordinary humans such as he: “Strike one of [Cato's] keys and you have struck them all; there is in him a harmony of sounds in perfect concord such as no one can deny. In our cases on the contrary everyone of our actions requires to be judged on its own: the surest way in my opinion would be to refer each of them to its immediate circumstances, without looking farther and without drawing any firm inference from it.” As he also notes, “if [a man] cannot bear slander but is resolute in poverty; if he cannot bear a barber-surgeon's lancet but is unyielding against the swords of his adversaries, then it is not the man who deserves praise but the deed.”5
According to some scholars, being overweight signals bad self-control (or a high rate of time discounting) and allows others to predict that the person will also be unable to keep his promises or engage successfully in long-term ventures. Counterexamples come easily to mind. Louis XVIII was grossly overweight. On one occasion, he consumed 180 oysters at one sitting. Yet he also persevered unflinchingly in his efforts to regain the throne of France during twenty-five years of exile. More recently, Governor Christie of New Jersey
addressed the fact that there has been discussion over his weight in recent weeks, saying the jokes did not bother him. “I'm not particularly self-conscious about this,” he said, adding: “It's not a news flash to me that I'm overweight.” While Christie said he found many of the jokes about his weight funny, Americans should “look down upon” the “people who pretend to be serious commentators” who suggested he couldn't be president because of his weight. “The people who wrote [that] are ignorant people,” said Christie. “To say that because you are overweight you are therefore undisciplined – I don't think undisciplined people get to achieve great positions in our society,” he said
(Washington Post, October 5, 2011).
Let me give some examples from art and artists. Proust wrote that “one might have thought” that the young men in Le temps retrouvé who were paid for inflicting pain on the customers of Jupien's brothel must be “fundamentally bad, but not only were they wonderful soldiers during the war, true ‘heroes,’ they had just as often been kind and generous in civil life.” Commenting on the apparent contradiction between Swann's “exquisite dissimulation of an invitation to Buckingham Palace” and his boast that the wife of a lower functionary had visited Mme Swann, he wrote that
the main reason was (and this is one that holds for all of humanity) that even our virtues are not extraneous, free-floating things which are always at our disposal; in fact they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the occasions for acting on which we feel they should be deployed that, if we are required to engage in some different activity, it can take us by surprise, so that we never even think that it too might entail the use of those very virtues.
The jazz musician Charlie Parker was characterized by a doctor who knew him as “a man living from moment to moment. A man living for the pleasure principle, music, food, sex, drugs, kicks, his personality [sic] arrested at an infantile level.” Another great jazz musician, Django Reinhardt, had an even more extreme present-oriented attitude in his daily life, never saving any of his substantial earnings, but spending them on whims or on expensive cars, which he quickly proceeded to crash. In many ways he was the incarnation of the stereotype of “the Gypsy.” Yet you do not become a musician of the caliber of Parker and Reinhardt if you live in the moment in all respects. Proficiency takes years of utter dedication and concentration. In Reinhardt's case, this was dramatically brought out when he damaged his left hand severely in a fire and retrained himself so that he could achieve more with two fingers than anyone else with four. If these two musicians had been impulsive and carefree across the board – if their “personality” had been consistently “infantile” – they could never have become such consummate artists.
After 1945, the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who had collaborated with the Nazis during the war, underwent psychiatric observation to determine whether he was mentally capable of being tried (he was eighty-six years old at the time). When the psychiatric professor asked him to describe his “main character traits,” he replied as follows:
The so-called naturalistic period – Zola and his time – wrote about persons with main character traits. They had no use for nuanced psychology. People had one dominant capacity that governed their actions. Dostoyevsky and others taught us all something different about people. From the very beginning I do not think there is a single person in any of my writings with this dominant and unitary capacity. They are all without so-called character – they are divided and fragmented, not good not bad, but both. Nuanced and changing in their mind and in their actions. This is no doubt how I am myself. It is very possible that I am aggressive, and that I have a little of the other traits the professor suggested – vulnerable, suspicious, selfish, generous, jealous, righteous, logical, sensitive, a cold nature. All these would be human traits, but I cannot give any of them the preponderance in myself.
In Chapter 16, I pursue the question of character or “lack of character” in works of fiction. Here I shall only note that Hamsun does not refer to the possibility that he might be, for instance, consistently generous in one type of situation and consistently selfish in another. I now turn to this issue.
The power of the situation
“Being impulsive with money” and “being dedicated to one's music,” “being talkative at lunch,” or “being conscientious in one's research” are also, of course, character traits. They are, however, situation-specific or local traits rather than global personality features that manifest themselves across the board in all situations. Contrary to folk psychology, systematic studies find very low levels of cross-situational consistency for character traits. Although correlations exist, they are typically so low that they cannot be detected “by the naked eye.” Psychopaths may exhibit uncaring behavior across the board,6 and the younger Cato may have been consistently heroic, but for the great majority of individuals who fall between these extremes such consistency is not to be expected. The more extreme idea of folk psychology, according to which all virtues go together, has not been as thoroughly tested, perhaps because it seems so obviously implausible. Yet it may still have a grip on the mind, as shown by our confidence in the medical skills of doctors who have good “bedside manners.” In classical antiquity, the idea that excellence in one arena was an infallible predictor or “index” of excellence in others was common. Psychologists refer to this as a “halo effect.”
Often, therefore, the explanation of behavior is found in the situation rather than in the person. Consider for instance the fact that some Germans acted to rescue Jews from the Nazi regime. On a “characterological” theory, one would assume that the rescuers had an altruistic personality type that non-rescuers lacked. It turns out, however, that the factor with the strongest explanatory power was the “situational” fact of being asked to rescue someone. The causal link could arise in two ways. On the one hand, it is only by being asked that one can obtain the information that is needed to act as a rescuer. On the other hand, the face-to-face situation of being asked might trigger acceptance because of the shame one would feel if one refused.7 The first explanation assumes altruism but denies that it is sufficient to explain the behavior. The second denies altruism and substitutes social norms for moral norms. On either account, what differentiates rescuers from non-rescuers is the situation in which they find themselves rather than their personality.
The “Kitty Genovese” case is another example of the power of the situation. It is implausible to stipulate, on the basis of their inaction, that all the witnesses to her murder were callous and indifferent to human suffering. Rather, many of them may have thought that someone else was going to call the police, or that since nobody was doing anything about it the situation was not as serious as it might seem (“probably just a domestic dispute”), or that the inaction of the others suggested that direct intervention might be risky.8 These lines of reasoning become more plausible the greater the number of passive bystanders. Thus in one experiment, subjects heard a confederate of the experimenter feigning an epileptic seizure over the intercom system. When subjects believed they were the only listener, 85 percent intervened to help; when they believed there was one other listener, 62 percent intervened; when they believed there were four others, 31 percent intervened. In another experiment, 70 percent of lone bystanders intervened but only 7 percent did so when sitting next to an impassive confederate.9 With two naive subjects, the victim received help in 40 percent of the cases. Thus not only does the chance that any given bystander will intervene go down when there are more of them, but the chance that some bystander will intervene also falls with the number of bystanders. In other words, the dilution of the responsibility to intervene caused by the presence of others occurs so fast that it cannot be offset by the greater number of potential interveners.
In another experiment, theology students were told to prepare themselves to give a brief talk in a nearby building. One-half were told to build the talk around the Good Samaritan parable (!), whereas the others were given a more neutral topic. One group was told to hurry since the people in the other building were waiting for them, whereas another was told that they had plenty of time. On their way to the other building, subjects came upon a man slumping in a doorway, apparently in distress. Among the students who were told they were late, only 10 percent offered assistance; in the other group, 63 percent did so. The group that had been told to prepare a talk on the Good Samaritan was not more likely to behave as one. Nor was the behavior of the students correlated with answers to a questionnaire intended to measure whether their interest in religion was due to the desire for personal salvation or to a desire to help others.10 The situational factor – being hurried or not – had much greater explanatory power than any dispositional factor.
It would not be accurate to subsume this analysis under that of the previous chapter, by saying that the students in the “hurry” category behaved the way they did because of a time constraint. Their constraint was not an objective or “hard” one, and in fact 10 percent of the students in this group did offer assistance. Rather, the situation shaped behavior by affecting the salience of competing desires. The face-to-face request enhances the strength of other-regarding motives, whereas being told to hurry diminishes it. Being able to see the reward that is imminently available makes it more attractive compared to one that will only be available with a delay, just as the sight of a beggar in the street can trigger generosity that the abstract knowledge of poverty would not. “Kitty Genovese” situations change both the perceived costs and perceived benefits of helping. The desire to comply with instructions by an impassive experimenter that “you must continue” to administer apparently painful and possibly fatal electrical shocks overrules the desire not to inflict pain needlessly.
There is no general or common mechanism by which a situation can affect behavior. Situations range from face-to-face demands to rescue Jews to the most trivial events, such as when finding a quarter in the coin return slot of a pay phone lifts one's mood and makes one help a stranger (in reality a confederate of the experimenter) retrieve a bunch of papers dropped on the sidewalk. The important lesson from these observations, in real life and in the laboratory, is merely that behavior is often no more stable than the situations that shape it. A person may be talkative at lunch when he can relax with long-standing colleagues and be tongue-tied with strangers. A person may consistently give to beggars but otherwise not give a thought to the poor. A person may invariably be helpful in situations in which nobody else can help, and invariably passive in the presence of other potential helpers. A man may be consistently aggressive and make biting remarks to his wife, yet be calm and generous to other people. His wife, too, may display the same dual behavior. His aggression triggers hers, and vice versa.11 If they rarely see the spouse interact with other adults, for example, at the workplace, they may believe that he or she is intrinsically aggressive rather than merely aggressive in the situation defined by their presence.
The spontaneous appeal to dispositions
To pursue the last example, marital therapists often try to make the spouses who seek their help switch from character language to action language (see Chapter 8). Rather than saying, “You are a bad person,” thereby leaving little room for hope or change, they should make an effort to say, “You did a bad thing.” The latter phrasing leaves open the possibility that the action in question might have been triggered by specific situational factors, such as a provocative remark by the other spouse. One reason (among many) why therapists often have little success in reframing conflicts in this way is that people spontaneously privilege character-based explanations of behavior over situation-based ones. If we learn that somebody has contributed to a “gay rights” ad, we tend to assume that the person is gay or liberal rather than that he was asked in a way that made it hard to refuse. When interviewing a job candidate, we tend to explain what the person says or does in light of the dispositions we (overconfidently) impute to him or her, rather than to the special nature of the interview situation. Language itself reflects the dispositional bias. Adjectives that apply to actions (“hostile,” “selfish,” or “aggressive”) can usually also be applied to the agent, whereas there are few characterizations of actions that also apply to situations (“difficult” is an exception).
Psychologists refer to the inappropriate use of dispositional explanation as the fundamental attribution error, that is, explaining situation-induced behavior as caused by enduring character traits of the agent. When subjects were asked to predict the behavior of the theology students who encountered a distressed individual, they (wrongly) thought that people whose religion was based on a desire to help others would be more likely to act as a Good Samaritan and (again wrongly) that being in a greater or lesser hurry would make no difference at all. Other subjects overpredicted infliction of electrical shocks in the absence of the specific situational factors in the original experiment, thus revealing their belief in a dispositional explanation. When an instructor assigns a student the task of writing a pro-Castro essay, other students, knowing how it was assigned, still interpret the essay as manifesting a pro-Castro attitude. When students were asked to volunteer for tasks with either low or high remuneration, and low or high numbers of volunteers resulted, observers, knowing the pay differential, nevertheless predicted that all volunteers were more likely than non-volunteers to volunteer for a non-paying cause. The observers, in other words, attributed the action of volunteering to a disposition to volunteer rather than to the reward structure of the situation.
People in some societies seem less prone than those in others to the fundamental attribution error. Experiments indicate that compared to Americans, Asians ascribe more importance to the situation and less to personal dispositions in explaining behavior. Real-life situations, too, display this difference. Thus in 1991, an unsuccessful Chinese physics student shot his adviser, several fellow students, and then himself. In the same year, an American postal employee who had lost his job shot his supervisor, several fellow workers and bystanders, and then himself. Both events were widely reported in English and in Chinese newspapers, the former consistently explaining them in dispositional terms (“disturbed,” “bad temper,” “mentally unstable”) and the latter in situational terms (“easy access to guns,” “had just lost his job,” “victim of pressure to succeed”). Other findings confirm this difference. It might be due, however, to the fact that situational factors actually play a greater role in generating the behavior of Asians. Rather than being better at overcoming the dispositional bias, they may have less of a bias to overcome, or both of these factors might operate.
Overcoming the fundamental attribution error can be liberating. First-year college students who are told that most freshmen do poorly but that their grades subsequently improve, in fact do somewhat better in later years than those who are not given this information. The latter are more likely to impute their poor performance to their low ability than to the unfamiliar and distracting college environment. Not believing they can do better, they are less motivated to try. When oppressed groups shed the essentialism of their oppressors – the idea that women, blacks, or Jews are intrinsically inferior – they can more easily shed their shackles.
Is the fundamental attribution error hot or cold – a motivated mistake or more along the lines of an optical illusion? To the extent that motivation enters into the process of attribution, there is no reason why it should consistently lead us to overemphasize dispositions. On self-serving grounds, we should attribute our success to our enduring character traits, and our failures to unfortunate circumstances.12 If the French moralists are to be believed, we should attribute the successes of others to their good luck and their failures to their dispositions.13 On cognitive grounds, the tendency to favor the person over the situation may be an instance of a more general tendency to pay more attention to the moving foreground than to the static background. It follows that the error should be less common in cultures in which more evenhanded attention is paid to foreground and background, as seems to be the case in Asian cultures.
The rehabilitation of the person
The findings I have described undermine what one might call “crude essentialism” in the study of personality. It is simply not true that people are aggressive, impatient, extroverted, or talkative across the board. At the same time, the findings do not imply that the situation is all-powerful in explaining behavior. Rather, we have to decompose “the” character into a set of contingent response tendencies. Instead of characterizing a person as altruistic, we might describe him or her by the phrase “helps when asked, but does not volunteer to help,” or by the phrase “helps when unstressed, but is neglectful when stressed.” Each of these phrases might characterize one aspect of a person and thus underwrite a more subtle form of essentialism. A person might scold a spouse for never cleaning up around the house (“you're lazy”) or for never cleaning up unless asked to (“you're thoughtless”). In the latter case, the spouse might be proactive rather than reactive in other matters, such as monitoring the health of the children in the family. There would be no across-the-board trait of reactiveness.
In this perspective, explanation of behavior rests on the particular situation plus the person-specific relation between situations and behavioral propensity. One person might be highly aggressive with individuals over whom he has power, but exceptionally friendly with those who have power over him, whereas another person might show the opposite pattern. If we observe both of them behaving in a friendly manner, we might be tempted to conclude that they both are of a friendly disposition. As should be clear by now, however, the similarity of behavior might be due to differences in situation and in response contingencies that exactly cancel each other.
Bibliographical note
The “tendency to overestimate the unity of personality” was clearly stated by G. Ichheiser, “Misunderstandings in human relations: a study in false social perception,” American Journal of Sociology 55 (1949), Supplement. Recent work deemphasizing “character” derives from W. Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: Wiley, 1968). The present exposition relies heavily on L. Ross and R. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), and on J. Doris, Lack of Character (Cambridge University Press, 2002). George Lansbury's comment on Hitler is in his book The Quest for Peace (London: Michael Joseph, 1938), p. 141. The references to Communist organizers in Vietnam and to Mafiosi are from, respectively, S. Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and D. Gambetta, “Trust's odd ways,” in J. Elster et al. (eds.), Understanding Choice, Explaining Behavior: Essays in Honour of Ole-Jørgen Skog (Oslo: Academic Press, 2006). The reference to the effects of intervention is from J. R. Harris, No Two Alike (New York: Norton, 2006). The willingness to inflict electrical shocks is described in a classic study by S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper, 1983). A useful perspective on his account is G. Perry, Behind the Shock Machine (New York: The New Press, 2012). The information about the two musicians is found in R. Russell, Bird Lives: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker (New York: Charterhouse, 1973), and M. Dregni, Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (Oxford University Press, 2004). The statement by Hamsun is translated from G. Langfeldt and Ø. Ødegård, Den rettspsykiatriske erklœringen om Knut Hamsun (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1978), p. 82. The use of behavior as an “index” in antiquity is discussed by P. Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 114, 773; see also P. Veyne, “Pourquoi veut-on qu'un prince ait des vertus privées?” Social Science Information 37 (1998), 407–15. The “characterological” explanation of the willingness to rescue Jews is argued by K. Monroe, M. C. Barton, and U. Klingemann, “Altruism and the theory of rational action: rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe,” Ethics 101 (1990), 103–22. The “situationist” explanation is argued by F. Varese and M. Yaish, “The importance of being asked: the rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe,” Rationality and Society 12 (2000), 307–24. A skeptical note about the tendency to infer dispositions from behavior is sounded in J. L. Hilton, S. Fein, and D. Miller, “Suspicion and dispositional inference,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 (1993), 501–12. The contrast between Americans and Asians is summarized in R. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2004). What I call the “rehabilitation of the person” is argued in W. Mischel, “Towards an integrative science of the person,” Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004), 1–22.
1 Presumably as a parody of such assertions, Thomas de Quincy wrote that if “once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.”
2 Not only folk psychology: economists who argue that agents signal through their behavior whether they are “good types” or “bad types” also overestimate consistency.
3 There is a twist to these findings. The children of parents who complied with the advice of the interventionists did better at school than the children of non-compliant parents, a fact cited by some in support of the spillover from home to school. Yet the finding may be due simply to the fact that compliance is inheritable. Parents who conscientiously follow the instructions of an interventionist are more likely to have children who conscientiously follow the instructions of a teacher.
4 In a letter to the ethicist Randy Cohen (New York Times Magazine, January 15, 2006) an academic asked whether the fact that an untenured colleague claimed discounts at the Faculty Club to which he was not entitled warranted a vote against him for tenure “because of his dishonesty and its potential extension to his research.” Cohen said no, on the grounds that “people who behave badly in some situations often behave well in others.”
5 Yet he also said, “no man who has been a real fool once will ever be really wise again.” Is it true? In Western societies some former Stalinists and Maoists have joined the community of reason, but others have not. Some went from one kind of foolishness to another.
6 Since an intelligent egoist who cared about the future would often have an interest in mimicking concern for others (Chapter 5), the ultimate explanation of psychopathic behavior might be excessive discounting of the future.
7 Similarly, the success of telethons in making people give money does not rest on their appeal to altruistic motives but to the fact that they are accompanied by a knock on the door by someone making a face-to-face request. In this case, the information-based explanation is clearly inadequate.
8 People who were afraid of intervening physically to protect the victim from her assailant might still have called the police. At the time, however, the police did not accept anonymous calls, so that bystanders might have been afraid of getting into trouble. In other situations of this kind the option of calling the police may be unavailable.
9 This is at least the general tendency in the numerous experiments of this kind that have been carried out. In the one just cited (the epileptic seizure heard over the intercom) it turns out that if we assume that the other listeners were real, naive subjects who received the same information (and not simply confederates or fictions created by the experimenter), the chance that at least one of them would intervene is roughly constant, that is, around 85 percent. In the case of five subjects (the main subject and the four listeners), the chance that any one of them would abstain from intervening is 0.69. The chance that all of them would abstain is (0.69)5, or 0.156, yielding a likelihood of 0.844 that at least one would intervene.
10 Just like the subjects who were induced to inflict electrical shocks, many of those who hurried by the man in distress were themselves visibly distressed by the encounter.
11 Metaphorically speaking, they are in a “bad psychological equilibrium.” Yet aggression need not be a “best response” to aggression (as required by the game-theoretic notion of equilibrium), only a psychologically intelligible one.
12 Sometimes, though, we may be motivated to impute our failures to our character. A gambler or an alcoholic may be happy to tell himself that he “just cannot help it” in order to have an excuse for persisting. As I noted in Chapter 9, students may claim that they are unable to do their homework when in reality they are just unwilling.
13 Sometimes, though, we may be motivated to impute the successes of others to their character flaws. Anti-Semitism relies on the myth that Jews succeed because their immoral character makes them willing to adopt any means to get ahead.