One of my research projects for the summer is to get a handle on the social psychology research on character and its effects on human behavior. Well, that description is a bit too ambitious -- the project is really to figure out how this vast literature matters for moral philosophy, and I'm helped a great deal in this endeavor by an excellent recent book by John Doris (formerly of UC-Santa Cruz, now at Wash. U.), Lack of Character. Doris's claim, based on extensive familiarity with experimental social psychology, is that a person's character, personality, virtue, or what have you makes considerably less difference to behavior than is commonly assumed. Knowing that a person is honest or compassionate tells us relatively little about whether he or she will cheat or come to the aid of another in a given situation. If the empirical research actually means what Doris says it does, teachers who aim to affect their students' character, judgment, or ethical reflection have some hard questions to ask themselves.
Some of the studies Doris relies on are quite well known, such as the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority and the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this group, the "Good Samaritan" study is particular fascinating: A group of students at Princeton Theological Seminary were told they were participating in a study of how quickly they could think on their feet as they prepared to preach a sermon. One group was told to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan (in which an outcast from the community was the only one of three passers-by to render aid to a traveler in distress) and the other group was given a topic having nothing to do with helping behavior. As they were leaving, each student was told that he or she either had plenty of time to get to the building where the sermon would be delivered, that he or she was basically on time, or that he or she was late and had to hurry. The "hurry" condition was randomly distributed with respect to the topic of the sermon -- that is, some of the students in each group (no hurry, moderate hurry, big hurry) preached on each topic. On the way to the other building, the students encountered a "victim" (actually a confederate of the experimenters) slumped against a doorway, in some apparent distress. The victim did not look particularly threatening, and the experiment took place during the day. One might think that the students' likelihood of helping would depend on whether they had recently been mulling over the Good Samaritan story, but actually the subject of the sermon made absolutely no difference to observed helping behavior. Of the students told they were in a big hurry, 10 percent stopped to help; of the group told they were just on time, 45 percent stopped to help; and of the students told they had plenty of time, 63 percent assisted the "victim." The study, by the way, is reported in J.M. Darley & C.D. Batson, "From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior," 27 J. of Personality and Social Psych. 100 (1973).
This and many other studies show that antecedently existing moral character traits (presumably divinity students are commonly regarded as more compassionate than the average person) and even specific attempts to change behavior through moral instruction have less influence on behavior than seemingly insignificant situational variables. If these findings are valid, then is there any room for education that aims to influence one's character or values? In the context of the subject of this blog, I often hear the claim that legal ethics education ought to be about more than just learning and applying a bunch of legal rules -- the law of lawyering, as it's called. Legal ethics education ought to be about inculcating the right kind of moral character. Leaving aside questions of whether we could agree on what constitutes the right character for lawyers (does Lynne Stewart have it? John Yoo? Joe Jamail?), research in social psychology suggests that contextual features wholly unrelated to character have a much more profound influence on behavior.
This doesn't mean simply giving up the game of ethics, and certainly not legal ethics. Where the behavior of lawyers is involved, we can always fiddle with the rules, impose new duties (e.g. the S-Ox up-the-ladder reporting requirement), step up enforcement, create new lines of accountability (such as the loss prevention programs that malpractice insurers often require of insured law firms), or try to make informal enforcement mechanisms more effective. The one thing that seems likely not to work, however, is affecting the character of lawyers and law students directly. This suggests we can show To Kill a Mockingbird at CLE's all we want, and it won't make a darn bit of difference. I'm not denying that ethical reflection is an interesting process, or that the subject of ethics (here in the sense of "ethics beyond the rules") is an important discipline for study. Insofar as we aim to affect behavior, however, the best available empirical research seems to suggest that attempting to modify students' (or lawyers') character is likely to be useless.