Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us [Hardcover]

This is another one of those fascinating books that deals with "What psychology can tell us about ourselves." In this case, it's Character. We tend to predict someone's behavior from their character, but every now and then someone behaves in a way we wouldn't expect. Almost every day we read of the public figure that's behaved in a totally reprehensible manner (although we tend to expect better behavior from them than ourselves).

David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo have produced a book that tells us not so much how to tell if some individual will "break character," but rather what character is. And surprise - character is a moving target. Extreme circumstances make us behave in ways no-one can predict - least of all, ourselves. We may claim to have high moral standards, but such people (not ourselves, naturally) may suddenly lose them. What DeSteno and Valdesolo show is that people who "let themselves down" never expected that this would happen.

Why did the NASA astronaut, veteran of many psychological tests, suddenly decide to put on adult diapers and drive across country to confront the man she loved? Why did the Eagle Scout, admired by many, eventually destroy his career as Governor of South Carolina by taking a mistress in Argentina? To most of us, living our humdrum lives, these actions seem ridiculous. And that is why - a humdrum life never presents us with a totally new set of circumstances that we must deal with. So it's easy to live our lives in character.

DeSteno and Valdesolo are professors of psychology, so this book is not just philosophical thinking about how we behave, but also an exploration of how to test people to find out what they'd do in a particular situation. All too many of these kinds of books describe these tests as if they were handed to the psychiatrists on stone tablets, but in fact they have to be thought up in a way that the participants don't catch on. This is another great reason to read this book.

Character, we learn, has to do more with the ant and the grasshopper - long-term gains versus short-term gains. DeSteno and Valdesolo argue that this has arisen from the way humans have evolved, and they show that this has made us smarter than before.

The book also covers pride and hubris, using the public example of Tom Cruise. In fact just about every chapter has something about an out-of-character flaw and the experiments DeSteno and Valdesolo devised to see how commonplace these were in the general population. Be prepared to be surprised about how likely you are to do something bad.

There's a lot of humor, particularly when they describe a guy "coming on" to a woman who was then dropped for no apparent reason. Naturally, they wanted to keep expenses to a minimum, so co-author Piercarlo Valdesolo volunteered himself to be the guy who flirted outrageously with the subjects. I'm sure you'd approve of his actions, and in similar circumstances you'd selflessly flirt with the gender of your choice, in the name of science.

As you can imagine, I like this book a lot. It has something that speaks to all of us, especially since it speaks to behaviors that we'd claim that we'd always choose the best path. The way they come up with experiments is interesting, and they give full acknowledgement to the people in the lab who helped come up and carry out the experiments.

In short, buy this book. It will teach you something about yourself that you probably don't know and probably don't want to know. But self-knowledge is never a dangerous thing, and I hope that the book will find wide acclaim.

This is an interesting, scientific look at the nature of human character. The research scientists who authored this volume, David DeSento at Northeastern University and Piercarlo Valdesolo at Amherst College, have drawn upon the research of others or devised some clever studies of their own for testing various aspects of character. Often starting with a vivid example from the tabloids (Tiger Woods, Governors Sanford and Spitzer, etc.), they explore the things that make all of us susceptible (under the right conditions) to moral failure, hypocrisy, excessive pride, cruelty, cheating, and intolerance. The laboratory study they devised to test the relationship of gratitude to acting on the "Golden Rule" was especially clever and persuasive (I won't spoil it for you). For each of the characteristics studied, the authors show an evolutionary basis for choosing between the deferred gratification solution (the ant's position in Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper) and that of immediate satisfaction (the grasshopper's). Human's always act in self-interest, but how they understand what will serve them best varies based on the peculiarities of the situation at hand.

This book is very readable. At times I wanted to know more about how the studies were set up and carried out; in other instances, I had no desire to linger over details and appreciated getting the executive summary. In the end, the authors don't extrapolate any solutions for people who may want to know how to best guard against major lapses of character. I think the best readers can do is to remind themselves that they are not immune from any temptation or weakness. In the mean time, we can all afford to be a little more forgiving when noticing the character deficiencies of others.

Good character is that highly coveted trait, chiseled in steel, that we all strive for.....or is it? Our authors say it isn't, that character is highly variable and related to context - a temporary state that is a tug-of-war between short-term versus long-term interests. They argue that "neither intuition nor reason is always optimal - both can lead you astray." Not only that, social factors are constantly at work, biasing the "character" traits in one direction or the other, changing with (what seems like) the wind. The authors are not just casual observers - they have proof.

They're scientists who spend countless hours dreaming up elaborate games, situations, scams, & trickery involving real people interacting with other real people, some of whom are test subjects - but others are staff. The ruse is always cleared by review boards and revealed to participants (victims) at the end - and they almost always want to learn how they scored and why they acted the way they did.

Relying on the principles of EP - Evolutionary Psychology - our authors invent elaborate ruses to study hypocrisy and dating games. They zero in on the thin lines separating pride from arrogance; how compassion can instantly change to cruelty; when fairness & trust recognizes it's been scammed; between playing it safe vs taking a gamble; and when tolerance becomes bigotry.

Aside: Recently, I have read about resistance in university humanities departments to EP - humans being so special and all. We are - in the sense that our intelligence has given us free reign over our world - but humans are still very imperfect. We are poorly designed in many ways (backs, knees, tendency to war, self-delusion) - exactly what one would expect from evolution. Cockroaches or certain scorpions, which can live without food and water for almost a year, are also impressive. There is every reason to believe that our (at times) unethical behavior as well as our superior intelligence evolved in just as Rube-Goldberg a fashion as did our (very complicated and redundant) blood clotting mechanism and the hardiness of cockroaches.

Back to the book: This is a highly readable book documenting the authors' studies in layman's language. They feature the ant and the grasshopper who represent, respectively, "your logical side" versus "your impulsive side," that battle it out to see how much "character" a person might exhibit in dozens of manufactured ethical dilemmas. It's a helluva read and I recommend it highly. You won't be able to put it down.

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