In 1973, two psychologists named John Darley and Daniel Batson at Princeton Theological Seminary designed an experiment that has become one of the most quietly devastating findings in the psychology of moral behaviour.
The participants were seminary students — people training to become ministers, theologically educated, motivated by professional commitment to ethical action. The students were each told they needed to give a short talk in another building on campus. Some were told to speak on professional career opportunities for seminary graduates. Others were told to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan — the biblical story in which a traveller is beaten and left for dead by the side of the road, and several religious figures walk past before a Samaritan stops to help.
Before leaving for the talk, each student was given one of three conditions: they were running early, on time, or late. They then walked across campus to give the talk. Along the route, the researchers had placed a man slumped in a doorway, coughing, clearly in some kind of distress. The question was: would the students stop to help?
The results were striking and unsettling. Whether the student was about to speak on the Good Samaritan parable barely affected their behaviour — about the same proportion of “Samaritan” speakers and “career” speakers walked past the man as stopped. What mattered was time pressure. About 63 per cent of students who were running early stopped to help. About 45 per cent of those on time stopped. Only 10 per cent of those who were running late stopped. The situational variable — a few minutes of time pressure — produced a sixfold difference in whether seminary students, about to preach on helping a stranger in need, actually helped a stranger in need.
The broader situationist tradition
The Darley-Batson finding was part of a broader research tradition that emerged in social psychology from the 1960s onward, collectively known as situationism. The central claim of this tradition, built up across many experiments, is that human behaviour is far more sensitive to situational variables than ordinary intuition — or traditional moral philosophy — supposes. Character traits, to the extent they exist at all, are weaker predictors of behaviour than features of the specific situation someone is in.
The foundational experiments in this tradition include names you’ve probably encountered. Stanley Milgram’s 1960s obedience research, in which ordinary American volunteers administered what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to strangers because a researcher in a lab coat told them to. Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students assigned to play prison guards were reported to have quickly exhibited cruel behaviour toward students assigned to play prisoners (though the methodology of this specific study has been heavily criticised in recent years, and its results should be held with more caution than popular accounts suggest). The Darley-Batson Good Samaritan study. Bibb Latané and John Darley’s research on the bystander effect, showing that people are less likely to help a person in distress when other bystanders are present. Many others.
What unified this tradition was a specific claim: if you want to predict how someone will behave in a moral situation, you’re better off knowing the situation than knowing the person. The person’s personality, values, religious training, or professed beliefs tell you less than the number of bystanders present, the perceived authority of the person giving instructions, the time pressure they’re under, or the costs of intervention.
This was, and is, uncomfortable. It cuts against the way we naturally think about moral behaviour. We tend to attribute bad acts to bad character — that person is cruel, that person is dishonest, that person is selfish. The situationist research suggests that most ordinary people will act in most of these ways under the right (wrong) conditions, and that attributing the action primarily to character is usually a mistake.
The philosophical challenge
Two philosophers, Gilbert Harman at Princeton and John Doris at Washington University, took the situationist research seriously and used it to mount a challenge against traditional virtue ethics. Their argument, developed in the late 1990s and published in Doris’s book Lack of Character in 2002, was roughly this.
Virtue ethics, in the Aristotelian tradition and in most religious moral frameworks, rests on the assumption that humans have stable character traits — courage, honesty, kindness, and the rest — that produce consistent behaviour across situations. The good person is the one who has cultivated these traits; the bad person has not. Moral education consists in developing character.
But if the situationist research is right, Harman and Doris argued, this picture is empirically wrong. Character traits in the robust, cross-situationally consistent sense that virtue ethics assumes don’t really exist. What exists are context-specific dispositions that work in familiar situations and break down in unfamiliar ones. The Aristotelian project of building character is building something that doesn’t transfer to the situations where it’s most needed.
This is a serious challenge, and it prompted decades of philosophical argument that’s still ongoing. What emerged from the argument, through the work of philosophers including Christian Miller (whose book The Character Gap we touched on in the earlier character articles), is a more nuanced synthesis.
Character traits, Miller and others have argued, are real but weaker than the Aristotelian tradition assumed. Most people don’t have strong virtues in the classic sense. What they have are mixed traits — partial dispositions, context-sensitive tendencies, habits that work in some situations and fail in others. The situationists were right that character is less robust than virtue ethics hoped. The virtue ethicists were right that character is nevertheless real and cultivable. The honest middle position is that character matters, but less than traditional philosophy thought, and that situation matters much more than we usually acknowledge.
The defence of individual variation
Before concluding that situation is everything, an important qualification. Even in the most famous situationist experiments, there was significant individual variation in behaviour.
Not everyone in Milgram’s experiments went all the way to the maximum shock level. About a third refused at some point, often against significant pressure from the experimenter. Not everyone walked past the distressed man in the Good Samaritan study — even under the running-late condition, 10 per cent stopped. Not everyone showed the bystander effect in Latané and Darley’s research; some people helped regardless of how many others were around.
The situationist research doesn’t say that individual differences don’t matter. It says that they matter less, relative to situational factors, than popular moral psychology supposes. The person who consistently behaves well across difficult situations — who stops to help even when running late, who refuses unethical instructions even from authorities, who intervenes even when no one else is — is a real type, and a rare one. Within any specific situation, the mix of people who do and don’t act well reflects real individual variation.
What this means practically: character isn’t nothing. It just isn’t as robust as we tend to assume. A person with strong ethical habits will be more likely to act well under pressure than a person without such habits, but the difference will often be modest, and both kinds of people will respond substantially to the situation. Most of us, in most moral situations, behave roughly the way the situation trains us to behave. A smaller fraction of us maintain more consistency across situations, through some combination of temperament, training, and circumstance.
What this suggests about how to act
The practical implications of the situationist research are both humbling and actionable.
Don’t overestimate your own character. Almost everyone, confronted with the Milgram setup or the Good Samaritan paradigm, expects themselves to behave differently from the average. Almost everyone is wrong. The honest assumption is that in any specific moral situation, your behaviour will be shaped primarily by the features of the situation, not by your self-image. This is a humbling starting point, but it’s a more accurate one than the self-confidence most people bring.
Engineer the situations you’ll be in. Given that situation dominates, the most effective moral practice is often to arrange your life so that the situations you encounter are ones that favour good action rather than ones that undermine it. Don’t rely on willpower in high-temptation environments; reduce exposure to them. Don’t count on remaining calm under extreme pressure; organise your life to avoid unnecessary extreme pressure. Build in the conditions — adequate time, manageable workload, reliable relationships — that make good behaviour easier and bad behaviour harder.
Take early warning signals seriously in others. When someone tells you about a situation that’s producing pressure toward unethical action — in a workplace, in a community, in a relationship — take the situation seriously, not just the person’s character. Good people in bad situations often end up doing bad things. The solution is often to change the situation, not to exhort the person to resist it alone.
Notice the situations you’re in that are pushing you toward behaviour you wouldn’t endorse on reflection. These exist in every life — workplaces with specific kinds of pressure, social environments with specific group dynamics, time patterns that leave no room for ethical reflection. Noticing that the situation is producing the pressure is the first step toward either changing the situation or compensating for its effects.
Give other people more grace than you instinctively do. Most of the moral judgements we make about others’ behaviour attribute too much to their character and too little to the situations they were in. The colleague who acted badly in a specific high-pressure moment probably isn’t as bad as the moment suggests. The stranger who walked past a clearly distressed person probably wasn’t monstrous; they were probably in a specific situation (busy, distracted, unsure of the situation, assuming someone else would help) that most people in that situation respond to similarly.
The question that remains
The deepest thing the situationist research teaches is uncomfortable and important. Most of us are approximately as good as the situations we find ourselves in. This isn’t a counsel of moral despair — some people do act better than their situations predict, and the cultivation of character still matters at the margins — but it’s a serious qualification to the confident picture of personal moral agency that most moral education assumes.
What this implies, if you hold it honestly, is that serious moral living isn’t primarily about cultivating inner virtue. It’s about paying attention to the structure of the situations you’re in, the situations you put others in, and the situations that shape your community’s collective life. The person who arranges their life so that good action is relatively easy has probably done more for their own morality than the person who relies on willpower to do hard things in bad situations.
The question worth carrying, especially after you’ve surprised yourself in either direction by your own behaviour:
Was it really you, or was it mostly the situation — and if the situation was doing that much of the work, what does that mean for how you want to arrange your life going forward?
Key research referenced: John Darley and Daniel Batson’s 1973 Good Samaritan study; Stanley Milgram’s obedience research (Obedience to Authority, 1974); Bibb Latané and John Darley’s bystander-effect research; Gilbert Harman’s and John Doris’s philosophical challenge to virtue ethics (Doris, Lack of Character, 2002); Christian Miller, The Character Gap (2017).