Tags / 14 quotes from 3 sources
#situation
A New Semantic Similarity Based Measure For Assessing Research Publication’s Contribution
Open access for machines as well as humans
Overall, we believe this situation demonstrates the need for supporting Open Access to research publications not only for humans to read, but also for machines to access.
Lessons From My Career Change: Five Ways To Make Your Move Sustainable | Guardian Careers | Guardian Professional
Career change: move forward not away
We often leave a job or situation because we are unhappy about something: an overbearing manager, irritating colleagues, ridiculous hours. When we make a change, however, what thoughts, beliefs and habits travel with us recreating the environment we're escaping? A change is an…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Situation versus character: the dime experiment
important is it in determining what we do? It is a truism to say that how we behave is a result of two factors: our own natures and the situations we find ourselves in. Many are now claiming, however, that it is situation, not character, which often makes the biggest difference…
A good mood makes people nicer
More likely is that, as other experiments have suggested, being put in a good mood, even by something small, makes people temporarily nicer. Character has nothing to do with it.
Milgram's obedience experiments
More worryingly, our willingness to cause terrible harms also seems to be highly situation-dependent. Two classic studies stand out. In his notorious ‘obedience experiments’, Stanley Milgram asked subjects to deliver increasing levels of electric shock to someone in an…
The Stanford Prison Experiment
The other infamous case is the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which Philip Zimbardo and his team simulated conditions in a prison with student volunteers taking on the roles of prisoners and guards. The two-week experiment was abandoned after six days, because the guards had…
Zimbardo: the myth of human character
‘There’s the myth about human dignity and human character,’ he told me over lunch. ‘So we really want to believe that our actions all stem from some internal set of motives, of goodness, of morality, and courage, and they get perverted in certain situations for certain people…
Prison guards bounce back
It had taken Zimbardo five days to fall into this mentality, and a furious hour-long argument to change his mind back. But, as is usually the case, having stepped back, he was in no sense corrupted for life. ‘Most people, including all the research I know on Nazi guards, bounce…
Situations mitigate but don't excuse
It’s worth stressing that although Zimbardo argues we have underestimated the power of social situations because we overestimate the power of individual dispositions, that does not mean he thinks people are not accountable for their behaviour. All the situational approach says…
People typically lack character
‘situational factors are often better predictors of behaviour than personal factors … In very many situations it looks as though personality is less than robustly determinative of behaviour. To put things crudely, people typically lack character.’
Character varies with situation
The central truth is not that character is a myth, but that it varies more according to situation than we tend to assume. This means that, even if we take the findings at face value, a credible notion of character remains. Consider, for instance, a person’s tendency to be…
Moral luck under the Third Reich
corollary: the same person, with the same character, if now put into a life where a different range of situations was normal, could have the following cloud: Now the overall description of the exact same person would be ‘mean’, not ‘generous’. What this shows is that there is…
Few people are of consistent character
If people are indeed variable in this way, then what would that predict for the kinds of studies that Doris cites? We would expect to find that only a minority of people are actually of consistent good character, and, likewise, only a few of consistent bad character. We would…
Avoid tempting situations
Our knowledge of situationism should be used to build character more wisely, not to give up on it. For example, John Doris takes as one lesson the idea that we should avoid tempting situations rather than rely on character to enable us to resist temptation. The father of virtue…