underdawg's Full Review: John M. Doris - Lack of Character: Personality and...
John Doris’s Lack of Character makes a fantastic claim, that we do not have personality or character traits, at least not in the way that we commonly understand them. Is he right? I don’t think so, but let me tell you some more about the book first.
First, how does Doris define personality traits? Well, the commonsense view of them (called globalism) is that they are robust. They are consistent, so that one who is compassionate, for example, will exhibit compassionate behavior across a variety of situations, which vary in how conducive they are to helping behavior. They are stable, so that one will exhibit similar behavior in similar situations. After all, if you help a tourist find his way one day, but give someone wrong directions intentionally the next, you’re not really compassionate, are you? And they are evaluatively integrated, which means that, for example, loyal people will also tend to be honest. In other words, certain traits go together and others don't.
Doris seeks to undermine globalism mostly by disputing that traits are consistent. He looks at social psychology experiments focusing on compassion to prove his point. Anyone who’s taken Psychology 101 will remember the Milgram experiment where an experimenter coaxed subjects into giving stronger and stronger shocks to confederates (this is the term for the people who play along in these experiments). The shocks were fake, but the subjects largely did not suspect this. 65% were coaxed to go “all the way”, giving lethal shocks (so they thought, anyway) while, for all they knew, the confederates were dead. The subjects were not psychopaths and the experts in the field predicted that only around 2% would comply to full obedience. There’s also the Zimbardo Prison study, where a fake prison was constructed and volunteers were randomly separated into prisoners and guards. Within a week, the fake prison ceased to be a game. There was an insurrection and the guards were sadistic. Zimbardo, the experimenter in charge was eventually forced to end the experiment early, though judging from the video we watched in class, he did this reluctantly. In fact, he was pretty defensive throughout the video about the experiment’s moral dubiousness. Something that is important to note about these two experiments is the banality of the situation. The experimenter didn't threaten subjects to get them to administer stronger shocks. He merely said things like "You must continue", and calmly at that. If subjects protested enough, the experiment was to end. Are we really that pliable; could we be killers?
Anyway, what do these and the other experiments prove? Doris says they prove that the situation is more important than the trait in determining behavior. Traits are not consistent and therefore not robust. Globalism isn’t true; traits are only local. According to Doris, we can’t truly say that Alice is sociable, only that she is “office party sociable”. We surely know people that are sociable in some contexts and not others. So is Doris right? I’m only a philosophy minor, but I think his argument is quite flawed.
Some of the experiments he cites don’t prove anything at all. One experiment he brings up found that seminary students on the way to a presentation were much less likely to help someone apparently having a heart attack if the students were told they were late. Students told they were early and had time to spare stopped to help 63% of the time, those told they were on time helped 45% of the time, and those who were told to hurry helped only 10% of the time. Sounds damning, right? But the students in a hurry reported not even noticing the confederate. This seems like a problem with our perceptual mechanisms then! How can you help someone you don’t even notice? This really bothers me because if a mere philosophy minor like myself can think of this, then how many holes could someone well versed in moral philosophy poke in Doris’s argument?
Doris also brings up another study where people who found a dime in a phone booth were much more likely to help someone pick up dropped papers immediately afterwards (14 out of 16 helped), while those who didn’t find anything did not help often (only 1 out of 24 people stopped to help). He says this proves that small changes in mood can change our likeliness to show compassionate behavior, and so compassion is not a robust trait. BS, I say. How heinous is it to not help someone pick up their papers? Not very. If a small change in mood results in relatively insignificant changes in behavior, that doesn’t threaten the existence of traits. Furthermore, I’d like to see different varieties of this experiment where much more than some papers are at stake. Have the confederate scream, “That’s my thesis paper!” or have a confederate fake a heart attack and then see if the dime changes how many people help. That would be a study that would actually prove something.
Second, Doris’s proposal actually is fairly unworkable anyway. His explanations of behavior are dull. Why was Alice sociable at the office party? The average Joe would say, “Oh, she’s a friendly gal.” Doris would say, “Alice was sociable at the office party because she is office-party-sociable.” Yawn. Furthermore, where do you draw the line? What if Alice is only sociable when drunk? And say she only likes one brand of vodka, Cloudmir. She’ll only be sociable at office parties with Cloudmir then, right? Doris would then say (I can only guess, he never elaborates on this in the book), that Alice is “office-parties-with-Cloudmir-Vodka-sociable”. Fun. Let’s further say that Alice is only really sociable around white males, and rich ones at that. So now Alice is “office-parties-with-Cloudmir-Vodka -and-white-rich–males-sociable”. Quite a mouthful, huh? More importantly, are our character traits really that localized? If someone asked me on the street what our dear Alice is like, I wouldn’t say that. I’d say that she’s only sociable when drunk, and is a bit of a racist and a gold-digger too. Isn’t that a much more elegant way to describe people than what Doris suggests? Combinations of traits seem to do a better job of explaining complex behaviors that humorously localized ones.
There are countless other objections that I found online when I was researching for my philosophy paper, but I won’t recite them here as they are not my own work. I believe I’ve done considerable damage to Doris’s arguments already, and I’m not even a philosophy major, so imagine how many more holes there are to his book. Much of Doris’s book explains the implications of his conclusion that we don’t have character traits as we know them, but it’s useless since he hasn’t proved that globalism is false. I remain utterly unconvinced, though I guess I should give the book credit for making me think. Doris’s writing style is fairly simple and easier to understand than most philosophers, but he goes on and on and repeats the same points millions of times as his colleagues tend to do, and simply does not write interestingly enough for this book to appeal to someone who didn’t have to read this book for class.
So anyway, no need to get your panties all up in a bunch. We do have character traits, no matter what Doris says. Yay!
Oh and if you have this book for class, find the paperback, which is cheaper. My university book store, for some reason, only sells the hardcover so I bought it from Barnes & Nobles.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.