Character and personality traits are invoked to explain what people do and how they live: Peter didn't mingle at the party because he's shy, and Sandra succeeds in her work because she's diligent. Traits also figure in prediction: Peggy will join in because she's impulsive, and Brian will forget our meeting because he's absentminded. So too for those rarefied traits called virtues: James stood his ground because he's brave, and Katherine will not overindulge because she's temperate. Such talk would not much surprise Aristotle (1984: 11O6a14—23); for him, a virtue is a state of character that makes its possessors behave in ethically appropriate ways. I'll now begin arguing that predictive and explanatory appeals to traits, however familiar, are very often empirically inadequate: They are confounded by the extraordinary situational sensitivity observed in human behavior. Discussion of the descriptive psychology occupies me for several chapters; afterward, I'll be positioned to address related normative concerns.

Traits and Consistency

Dispositions

As I understand it, to attribute a character or personality trait is to say, among other things, that someone is disposed to behave a certain way in certain eliciting conditions. In philosophy, this seems a standard interpretation: Character traits, and virtues in particular, are widely held to involve dispositions to behavior.