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The distinction between automatic and controlled cognitive processes was imported into social psychology, and formed the basis for a new generation of “dual-process” theories of social cognition and behavior. However, some social psychologists have gone further to claim that automatic processes dominate social interaction, leaving little room for anything like free will. For these theorists, human beings are machines — automatons — after all. However, no empirical evidence supports such a strong claim about human nature. In part, the automaticity juggernaut appears to reflect a reaction to the cognitive revolution in social psychology, with its implication that social interactions are mediated by conscious, deliberate, rational thought; in part, it may be a reflection of the biologization of social psychology. But it also seems to be a reflection of an emerging “People Are Stupid” trend within social psychology, as well as a throwback to the historical alliance between situationism and radical behaviorism. Finally, the emphasis on automaticity appears to be based on the “epiphenomenalist suspicion” that consciousness plays no role in human behavior, as well as the allure of the pinball determinism of classical physics.

This chapter articulates a problem that virtue ethicists and their critics alike have almost entirely ignored, but which if unresolved would jeopardize the very possibility of virtue ethics. This problem stems from the conjunction of a necessary feature of virtue ethics and a commonplace one. The necessary feature is that virtue ethics understands right actions and virtuous persons in terms of the virtues, in the plural; and the commonplace is that virtue ethicists tend to be so open-handed about what “the virtues” are that on many theories there will be infinitely many of them. If right action is action in accordance with the virtues, and a virtuous person a person who has the virtues, but virtue ethics tells us that the virtues are infinitely many, then virtue ethics cannot say what right action is action in accordance with, or what it would be to be a virtuous person. This problem is called here the “enumeration problem”.

Philosophical psychologists have told us that “situationism” is bad news for virtue ethics and virtue theory more generally. Situationism is a research paradigm in social psychology that holds that situational variables have an impact on behavior that tells against disposition-based explanations of behavior. Some philosophical psychologists have argued that since there is little evidence for psychological dispositions, and since virtue theory as such is a normative theory about such dispositions, therefore virtue theory as such is empirically misguided. And since virtue ethics presupposes some theory of the virtues, virtue ethics is empirically misguided, too, and therefore of little practical value to creatures like us. This chapter begins a sustained argument that while situationism is plausible; it is not bad news for virtue theory provided that virtues are understood as forms of responsiveness to reasons. While situationism is bad news for “dispositions” of a certain type, virtues need not and indeed should not be understood as dispositions of this type. The chapter closely examines the contrast between situationism and the more traditional research program it means to replace, namely dispositionism. It then reviews situationism as motivating a positive alternative in personality theory and some positive evidence in favor of that alternative.

This chapter examines a body of social-psychological experiments that appear to give evidence against dispositionist accounts of personality and in favor of the importance of situation construal for behavior — a central situationist claim. The interpretation of this evidence has been the subject of enormous recent philosophical controversy. Consequently, the chapter begins by examining the methodology behind these experiments. It then reviews a small but representative sample of four major experiments of this type, and then considers and rejects a number of objections to the situationist interpretations of the findings of these experiments. The chapter argues that the evidence favors situationism, and in particular a cognitive-affective personality theory over a dispositionist one.

Some tensions inherent in joining the traditional concept of character to that of social roles are outlined in Chapter 6. They are illustrated through a discussion of the moral psychological dangers that attend role morality: inner compartmentalization or lack of integrity, inconstant virtues (honored in one role and neglected in another), and apparently incompatible roles (such as healer and upholder of criminal justice). Some difficulties springing from the way virtues are habituated, are also introduced, including the ethical status of virtues that are merely feigned (as when the practitioner pretends an empathic response to the patient that is not wholehearted or genuine).

Since its initial publication, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been applied in a diverse array of disciplines. Application to the legal and policy arenas, however, has been uncommon. This is true even though the dominant schemas that shape law and policy are like the attitudes, stereotypes, and other forms of implicit cognition that the IAT is so often harnessed to measure. Based upon research designed to identify the dominant knowledge structures, schemas and categories that shape law and policy, the most significant and salient policy scripts boil down to "markets are good, regulation is bad." This chapter will discuss the initial results of an ongoing Policy IAT intended to investigate the strength of those policy scripts across the ideological spectrum. The results shed light on the variability of policy scripts across political categories and attributional styles along a situationist-dispositionist spectrum as well as the malleability of implicit associations.

This chapter describes a major rift extending across many important debates over our legal structures, policies, and theories of law. It argues that the divide is based, to a significant extent, on contrasting attributional tendencies: the less accurate dispositionist approach, which explains outcomes and behavior with reference to people’s dispositions (that is, stable personalities, preferences, and the like), and the more accurate situationist approach, which bases attributions of causation and responsibility on unseen influences within us and around us (that is, cognitive proclivities and structures and external environmental forces). As this chapter summarizes, research on the underlying motives and conceptual metaphors behind conservatism and liberalism help explain the vital connections between those attributional styles and political ideologies.

This chapter explores the way in which dispositionism maintains its dominance as an attributional framework despite failing to capture accurately the causes of human behavior. The answer lies in a subordinate dynamic and discourse, naïve cynicism: the basic subconscious mechanism by which dispositionists discredit and dismiss generally more accurate situationist insights and their proponents. Without the operation of naïve cynicism, dispositionism would be far more vulnerable to challenge and change. Naïve cynicism is, thus, critically important to explaining how and why certain legal policies manage to carry the day. As a case study, the chapter considers the naïve cynical backlash against situationist accounts of the causes of prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other detentions centers.

This chapter demonstrates that naive cynicism is a pervasive dynamic that shapes policy debates big and small. It argues that naïve cynicism can operate at a particular moment or over long periods of time, and that naïve cynicism is embraced and encouraged by both elite knowledge-producers and the average person on the street. Examining the reactions of prominent academics to situationist scholarship, the chapter offers evidence that naive cynicism has played a significant role in retarding the growth and influence of insights drawn from social psychology and related fields within the dominant legal theoretical frameworks of the last half-century. Despite providing a more accurate depiction of the behavior of legal actors, this research from the mind sciences has been dismissed for decades in favor of commonsense dispositionist notions of causation, responsibility, and blame.

This chapter explores how ideology influences legal change. In particular, it discusses how feminist ideologies, often allied with social conservative ones, have changed how lawyers and judges approach interspousal torts. Those changes, though limited in scale, are apparent in doctrine and damage assessments. More generally, they are shaping how our society understands the relationships between men and women. While legal reformers are allowing women's stories of abuse finally to be heard, they tend to hear only stereotypical stories. Those stories are fueling a dispositionist perspective that reinforces stereotyped gender narratives in which women are either helpless victims of abuse or heartless perpetrators of emotional abuse. This dispositionist approach to tort law looks to individual choices and stereotyped narratives to attribute responsibility and blame in a rational and straightforward way, and overlooks the situational influences and constraints of each character in a tort lawsuit.

This chapter turns from social psychology to philosophical psychology, arguing that the positive account of personality suggested by situationism is one that virtue theory can naturally embrace, provided that virtues are forms of responsiveness to reasons. It begins by further defending the empirical adequacy of such a personality theory, which some philosophical psychologists have ignored, played down, or explicitly rejected. The rest of the chapter considers several possible virtue-theoretical responses to John Doris' recent charge that no virtue theory embracing the situationist view of personality could be both empirically and normatively adequate. The chapter rejects Doris' assumption that a normatively adequate virtue theory must depict virtues as proclivities to stereotypically “virtuous” behaviors. Rather, the virtue theorist can define character traits in terms of cognitive-affective personality attributes, and define virtues as character traits that are appropriately responsive to reasons. The chapter concludes that virtue theories that make phronesis part of all virtue are in the unique position of standing firmly on the current evidence from social psychology about the nature of personality.

The other difference that effective critical scrutiny of motivations brings is an alteration in the cognitive structure of motivation. This takes the form of metacognition: higher-order thoughts about one's motivations. This chapter argues that metacognitive abilities are not the sort of thing that could yield control over motivations. The very issue of control that arises at the first-order level of motivations also arises at the metacognitive level. To suppose otherwise is to assume that something miraculous happens in the move from first order to metalevel. This fallacy is labeled the “miracle-of-the-meta.” The fallacy is motivated and explained by way of discussion of higher-order thought models of consciousness.If the arguments of chapters 6 and 7 are correct, we have no workable account of the connection between scrutiny and control (and hence between control and both normativity and morality). The SCNM schema breaks down at the S-C stage.

Traditional virtue-oriented approaches to ethics suppose that acquiring relatively stable character traits, such as courage and compassion, is crucial in addressing the question of how to be. However, recent psychological studies cast doubt on the idea that people develop such traits. In light of this pessimism, the paper raises the question: what is left of virtue theory? It argues that much remains once one shifts from a traditional understanding of virtues to one of cognitive/affective “if…then” dispositions that form a person’s character. The central proposal is to understand such dispositions as “habitudes” – habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are acquired by example and repetition, and that enable one to competently react to varying situations one confronts. The resulting model of ethical comportment represents a psychologically realistic understanding of virtue. Furthermore, this account fits well with what we learn from the field of positive psychology about subjective well-being, thus helping to vindicate eudaimonism.

This chapter examines Jean-Patrick Manchette, ‘father of the néo-polar,’ who is widely credited with bringing French crime fiction into step with the radical left politics of the 1970s. This chapter argues that an attention to questions of generic conventions and narrative shape allows us to reconsider the politics of noir as a literary form. This reconsideration of Manchette’s fictional politics begins with a close reading of Manchette’s essays on what he called the forme-polar or noir form. I then analyze two of Manchette’s late novels, Three to Kill (1976) and The Prone Gunman (1981), showing how issues of masculinity, gendered violence, and (post-)colonial violence are embedded in these fictions. Moving to questions of narrative shape and meta-aesthetic rhetoric, I show how Manchette’s work offers a radical and challenging view of the implications of working with and in cliché. Ultimately, this chapter lays out the case for a more expansive reading of Manchette’s work, one which goes beyond populist narratives about the noir novel in France, and which reads Manchette’s work as a politicized challenge to the ‘noir form’ itself.

The question “What can social psychology tell us about the Holocaust?” is a difficult and complex one to answer. Perhaps it is fair to begin by saying that the Holocaust has influenced our understanding of social psychology more than the other way around. In the 1960s and early 1970s, seminal work in the field continued to be motivated by a need to understand the perpetrators of the Holocaust and other acts of collective violence. To this day, these studies represent social psychology's most salient demonstrations of situationism — a core tenet of the field that emphasizes the power of the situational forces over human behavior. This chapter discusses some of the ways in which genocide instigators differ from perpetrators and examines the most notorious genocidal and democidal instigator of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, from a social-psychological perspective. It demonstrates that even Hitler can be examined in terms of the same social-psychological principles used to describe and explain ordinary individuals.

Nancy's writing on the image may be understood as a critical engagement with the traditions of modern aesthetics and classical theories of art. However, the starting point for his approach to the image indicates that his writing on this topic has much wider ambitions than the treatment of a regional aesthetic topic. Nancy defines the image as a mode of access to sense. Nancy attempts an ontological rehabilitation of the image, which reiterates the precepts of his conception of being as ‘co-presence’. I will argue here that a careful study of the implications of this rehabilitation of the image can be used to clarify the significance of the tacit references that Nancy's ontology makes regarding politics.