Moral Character - Scientific Experiments Disputing The Existence of Moral Character

Scientific Experiments Disputing The Existence of Moral Character

The Milgram experiment was a study done in the early 1960s that helped measure a person's moral character. Subjects from different socio-economic groups were tested on their willingness to press a buzzer that caused a participant— posing as a subject— in another room to express great pain and distress for giving a wrong answer to a test question. When the subjects raised questions about what they are being asked to do, the experimenter applied mild pressure in the form of appealing to the need to complete the experiment. The Milgram experiment caused a huge amount of criticism among individuals. In post-experiment interviews with subjects Milgram noted that many were completely convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing. Although the subjects may have had moral values, many were criticized on whether they were a truly moral character.

In one experiment that was done, the moral character of a person was based on whether or not a person had found a dime in a public phone booth. The findings were that 87% of subjects who found a dime in a phone booth helped somebody in need, while only 4% of those who did not find a dime helped. Some found it very troubling that people would be influenced by such morally trivial factors in their choice whether to provide low-cost assistance to others. John M. Doris raises the issue of ecological validity—do experimental findings reflect phenomena found in natural contexts. He recognizes that these results are counterintuitive to the way most of us think about morally relevant behavior.

Another experiment that was done that asked college students at Cornell to predict how they would behave when faced with one of several moral dilemmas, and to make the same predictions for their peers. Again and again, people predicted that they would be more generous and kind than others. Yet when put into the moral dilemma, the subjects did not behave as generous or as kind as they had predicted. In psychological terms, the experimental subjects were successfully anticipating the base rate of moral behavior and accurately predicting how often others, in general, would be self-sacrificing.