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

David DeSteno (Author), Piercarlo Valdesolo (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 3, 2011

Have you ever wondered why a trumpeter of family values would suddenly turn around and cheat on his wife? Why jealousy would send an otherwise level-headed person into a violent rage? What could drive a person to blow a family fortune at the blackjack tables?
 
Or have you ever pondered what might make Mr. Right leave his beloved at the altar, why hypocrisy seems to be rampant, or even why, every once in awhile, even you are secretly tempted, to lie, cheat, or steal (or, conversely, help someone you never even met)?
 
This book answers these questions and more, and in doing so, turns the prevailing wisdom about who we are upside down. Our character, argue psychologists DeSteno and Valdesolo, isn’t a stable set of traits, but rather a shifting state that is subject to the constant push and pull of hidden mechanisms in our mind.  And it's the battle between these dueling psychological forces that determine how we act at any given point in time. 
 
Drawing on the surprising results of the clever experiments concocted in their own laboratory, DeSteno and Valdesolo shed new scientific light on so many of the puzzling behaviors that regularly grace the headlines.  For example, you’ll learn:

   • Why Tiger Woods just couldn’t resist the allure of his mistresses even though he had a picture-perfect family at home. And why no one, including those who knew him best, ever saw it coming. 

   • Why even the shrewdest of investors can be tempted to gamble their fortunes away (and why risky financial behavior is driven by the same mechanisms that compel us to root for the underdog in sports). 

   • Why Eliot Spitzer, who made a career of crusading against prostitution, turned out to be one of the most famous johns of all time.  

   • Why Mel Gibson, a noted philanthropist and devout Catholic, has been repeatedly caught spewing racist rants, even though close friends say he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. 

   • And why any of us is capable of doing the same, whether we believe it or not!

A surprising look at the hidden forces driving the saint and sinner lurking in us all, Out of Character reveals why human behavior is so much more unpredictable than we ever realized.
 

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A fascinating yet highly readable perspective on the psychology of the hero/villain spectrum of human character, inviting us to reconceive personality, both our own and that of others." – The Atlantic


“My bad -- and your bad too. This smart and lively book uses cutting-edge research in psychological science to reveal the hero and the villain that live inside each of us.”
-Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University and bestselling
author of STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS
 
 
“Who would have ever thought that a pair of social psychologists would have so much to say about good and evil? David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo are brilliant experimentalists and deep thinkers, and Out of Character hits the sweet spot --it's scientifically rigorous, smoothly written, and achingly relevant to everyday life. It shows how laboratory research is undermining the very notion of a fixed moral character, and explores a new approach to hypocrisy, pride, prejudice, jealousy, and love.”
-Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology, Yale University, author of HOW PLEASURE WORKS
 
 
“It is not unusual to think of someone as either a moral or immoral person, of good character or not.  David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo make the intriguing argument instead that the world is not filled with saints and sinners, but rather there is good and bad in all of us.  Marshalling data from some of the most clever and counterintuitive experiments in social psychology and interpreting these findings in new ways, DeSteno and Valdesolo surprise us on nearly every page.  Out of Character should be read by anyone interested in human behavior; it challenges simple but engrained ideas about virtue and evil in a lively, entertaining, and insightful way.”
-Peter Salovey, Provost, Yale University and co-creator of the theory of Emotional Intelligence
 

About the Author

DAVID DESTENO is associate professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he is also director of the Social Emotions Lab. He is editor of the American Psychological Association’s journal Emotion and has served as a visiting associate professor of psychology at Harvard University. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, ABC News, Scientific American, and NPR. He has also guest-blogged for the New York Times Freakonomics blog.
 
PIERCARLO VALDESOLO is an assistant professor of psychology at Claremont-McKenna College. His work has appeared both in top journals and major news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, and Newsweek, and he has been awarded fellowships at Harvard University and Amherst College. He is a contributor to the Scientific American Mind Matters blog.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; First Edition edition (May 3, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307717755
• ISBN-13: 978-0307717757
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.9 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #516,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, worth your time and money March 29, 2011

By David Field VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

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.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars That slippery thing known as your character April 24, 2011

By Charles S. Houser VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

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.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars EP put to the test April 19, 2011

By The Spinozanator VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

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.