ABSTRACT
This chapter provides brief discussion of relevant developments in social psychology and some of the situationist experiments. The view of personality is supported by an influential group of personality psychologists, who claim that personality is a collection of "global" traits, that is, traits that are consistently manifested in a wide variety of trait-relevant situations and temporally stable. The experimenters in the Good Samaritan study did not record participants' internal reactions to the distressed confederate at all. Milgram Obedience was interested in discovering how seemingly decent and compassionate people could nevertheless become involved in the atrocities carried out in Nazi Germany. Alice Isen and Paula Levin conducted an experiment designed to study the effect of mood on helping behavior. Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May performed a study to examine whether the disposition to behave honestly is cross-situationally consistent. Harman claims that there is no empirical reason to believe that character traits exist or have anything to do with producing behavior.
