The Character Gap: How Good Are We?

"One of the interesting things about this book is that it looks at the evidence. My background is both in science and in philosophy and while I love philosophical arguments and discussions, I also have been trained to say, ‘This is nice. It sounds good. But what do we know in terms of empirical evidence?’ This is an area where it’s difficult to do research. Character is difficult to describe in an operational way, in a way that you can measure. People disagree on what it means to have a certain character trait. What is a virtue? How do you measure that? Psychologists and social scientists in general are having a pretty hard time making progress. Miller’s book is a nice overview of where the empirical evidence is. He’s nuanced enough that he tells his readers, ‘You need to take this with a pinch of salt because there is discussion about this, that or the other.’ Nevertheless, the evidence that he shows cumulatively, throughout the book, is very interesting. The title, The Character Gap, refers to the notion that, typically, we’re not as good as we think we should be. There is a gap between where we would like to be and where we are in terms of our behavior. Most of us would like to be generous, fair and just and all that sort of stuff but it turns out that, in practice, we’re not quite there. “Typically, we’re not as good as we think we should be” A good part of the book is, firstly, about why. What kind of factors determine this character gap? Secondly, how do we overcome the gap? What kind of strategies work or do not work? So one of the reasons there is a gap is because we tend to be far more influenced by local situations than we realize. For instance, there is a classic experiment where people walk into a shopping mall and are exposed to the smell of freshly baked bread. If they are, it turns out that they’re far more likely to help a stranger in need a few minutes later than if they walk into the mall without smelling the bread. Now, of course, smelling or not smelling the bread has no moral valence at all, it shouldn’t influence how prone you are to help other people. But it turns out it does. So there are a lot of these subtle, and sometimes not very subtle, factors that affect our behavior. The good news is that once people are made aware of this, they can consciously improve. One nice example that is discussed by Miller is the so-called bystander effect. If you see somebody in distress on the street and you happen to be surrounded by people who are not intervening, the chances you are going to intervene are very small. That’s presumably for a number of reasons. You start asking yourself, ‘Why is it that these people are not doing anything? Maybe there is something fishy going on, maybe this is a setup.’ You don’t want to be embarrassed by being the person who puts themselves out. But once people are made aware of the existence of the bystander effect, they overcome it in very large percentages. There is a major shift in the way people behave. So the bad news is we’re influenced by a bunch of things that often are difficult to predict, and we’re not aware of; the good news is once we’re made aware, we can do something about it. Miller does discuss that. He has also published a technical article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that covers this issue. His analysis of the literature is that there is evidence for the existence of reliable patterns of behavior, which is what a character trait is. If you say that your friend is known to be generous, what you mean is that other things being equal he is more likely than average to give money to a charity or to be helpful to somebody with his time or something like that. It turns out that is true. But, again, there is a lot of variance because the specific circumstances do affect our behavior. Interestingly, however, as I said before, those circumstances play less and less of a role, the more we are aware of their effects. If somebody pays attention to what they’re doing, if they’re consciously saying, ‘I want to be a generous person’ then they more reliably act that way. The only part of the book where I have an objection—and I talked to the author about this and he wasn’t surprised—is the second to last chapter where he talks about how one way to become a better person is to embrace your belief in God and your religion. I’m sure that that works, but there’s nothing special about religion. You might as well embrace a philosophy of life, like Confucianism or Stoicism or Buddhism and you’ll probably get the same results. There’s nothing magical, so to speak, about God, as opposed to having a general framework and the self-conscious notion that you want to improve yourself."