Situationism and trait-eliciting situations.

The article critically examines situationist experiments, which suggest that people lack stable global character traits because their behavior varies significantly across contexts. It argues that many such experiments do not constitute genuinely trait-relevant situations, as factors like stress, ambiguity, and unfamiliarity can temporarily compromise individuals' specific capacities to recognize and act on moral reasons. This distinction between lacking a trait and lacking the capacity to manifest it in certain contexts challenges the interpretation that these experiments undermine global virtue theories. The article concludes that while situationist findings raise important questions, they do not definitively refute the existence of global character traits, especially when accounting for capacity-compromising conditions that affect behavior in novel or stressful environments.