The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,58
and May found, the same kids would cheat in the same ways in both cases. But once you changed any of those variables—the material on the test, or the situation in which it was administered—the kinds of cheating would change as well.
What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn’t a fundamental trait, or what they called a “unified” trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation. “Most children,” they wrote,
will deceive in certain situations and not in others. Lying, cheating, and stealing as measured by the test situations used in these studies are only very loosely related. Even cheating in the classroom is rather highly specific, for a child may cheat on an arithmetic test and not on a spelling test, etc. Whether a child will practice deceit in any given situation depends in part on his intelligence, age, home background, and the like and in part on the nature of the situation itself and his particular relation to it.
This, I realize, seems wildly counterintuitive. If I asked you to describe the personality of your best friends, you could do so easily, and you wouldn’t say things like “My friend Howard is incredibly generous, but only when I ask him for things, not when his family asks him for things,” or “My friend Alice is wonderfully honest when it comes to her personal life, but at work she can be very slippery.” You would say, instead, that your friend Howard is generous and your friend Alice is honest. All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.
Why do we make this mistake? It’s probably the result of the way evolution has structured our brain. For instance, anthropologists who study vervets find that these kinds of monkeys are really bad at picking up the significance of things like an antelope carcass hanging in a tree (which is a sure sign that a leopard is in the vicinity) or the presence of python tracks. Vervets have been known to waltz into a thicket, ignoring a fresh trail of python tracks, and then act stunned when they actually come across the snake itself. This doesn’t mean that vervets are stupid: they are very sophisticated when it comes to questions that have to do with other vervets. They can hear the call of a male vervet and recognize whether it comes from their own group or a neighboring group. If vervets hear a baby vervet’s cry of distress, they will look immediately not in the direction of the baby, but at its mother—they know instantly whose baby it is. A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.
The same is true of humans.
Consider the following brain teaser. Suppose I give you four cards labeled with the letters A and D and the numerals 3 and 6. The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side. Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true? The answer is two: the A card and the three card. The overwhelming majority of people given this test, though, don’t get it right. They tend to answer just the A card, or the A and the six. It’s a hard question. But now let me pose another question. Suppose four people are drinking in a bar. One is drinking Coke. One is sixteen. One is drinking beer and one is twenty five. Given the rule that no one under twenty one is allowed to drink beer, which of those people’s IDs do we have to check to make sure the law is being observed? Now the answer is easy. In fact, I’m sure that almost everyone will get it right: the beer drinker and the sixteen year old. But, as the psychologist Leda Cosmides (who dreamt up this example) points out, it is exactly the same puzzle as the A, D, 3, and 6 puzzle. The difference is that it is framed in