Embodied Situationism

ABSTRACT

Drawing on empirical material from social psychology, ‘situationism’ argues that the astonishing susceptibility of moral behaviour to situational influences undermines certain conceptions of character. The related, albeit more limited, thesis proposed in this paper, ‘embodied situationism’ (ES), engages a larger number of empirical sources from different fields of study and sheds light on the mechanisms responsible for particular, seemingly puzzling, situational judgments and behaviours. It is demonstrated that the empirical material supports the claims of ES and that ES is immune to some important objections against situationism.

KEYWORDS:

• situationism
• embodied cognition
• conceptual metaphors

Notes

¹ For a comprehensive account of situationalist psychology, see Ross and Nisbett [1991].

² See Williams [1985], Flanagan [1991], and Hursthouse [1999].

³ For a discussion, see Prinz [2009] and Alfano [2013: 62–81]. Others defend virtue ethics relying on accounts of personality traits. As Snow [2010: 137] puts it, ‘personality traits are alive and well, which means that the cognitive foundation of virtue ethics is, in fact, in rather good shape.’ For a criticism, see Miller [2014], who argues for a globalist theory of character, while remaining sceptical about virtue.

⁴ When philosophers scrutinize aspects of moral reasoning, they often reflect on well-known issues such as the question of moral luck, doing vs allowing harm, or the doctrine of double effect. Consequently, moral reasoning is frequently conceptualized in a somewhat narrow manner, as a species of practical reasoning that deals with questions about morally correct and morally incorrect courses of action.

⁵ Of course, many metaphors are acquired by reading literature and understanding relationships among words, rather than by bodily experience [Ritchie 2013: 84].

⁶ See also Kövecses [2000].

⁷ The connection between physical and social coldness and warmth might have a solid anatomical basis in human beings, as the insular cortex is implicated in processing both temperature (physical) and psychosocial input about personal warmth [Meyer-Lindenberg 2008; Kang et al. 2010].

⁸ For a corresponding top-down effect, Zhong and Leonardelli [2008] show that participants recollecting an experience of social exclusion estimate the room temperature as lower, while physical warmth (holding a warm cup of tea) helps to alleviate adverse feelings linked to social exclusion [Ijzeman et al. 2012].

⁹ This study is discussed in Miller [2013: 37] with a different aim. Miller points out that its results are incompatible with certain models of how guilt leads to increased social behavior.

¹⁰ For a corresponding top-down effect on participants who were primed with concepts of cleanliness in a scrambled-sentences task, see Schnall et al. [2008].

¹¹ Participants comply even if the scenario is suspect and does not clearly suggest purely scientific interest, and even if the victim seems critically injured. This suggests that participants either do not construe the situation in terms of conflicting normative standards or fail to make a rational decision.

¹² Motivating reasons differ from justifying reasons, as it is possible that the participant's de facto reasons for X-ing are in reality no reasons at all to X.

¹³ The distinction between aliefs and beliefs ties in with influential ‘dual-process’ accounts in neuroscience and psychology, maintaining that our minds function along two distinct types of processes. System1 processes are implicit, fast, cheap, but error-prone, whereas System2 processes are slow, explicit, rational, but laborious. For a defense of this link to dual-process approaches, see Kriegel [2012].

¹⁴ For a discussion of this criticism, see Prinz [2009].

¹⁵ I owe special thanks to the editor and two anonymous referees of this journal for providing very helpful comments and suggestions.