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zaph comments on The Good News of Situationist Psychology - Less Wrong
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I don't think separating character from situation is useful; rather than say "they are a giving person" and using the situation to explain an overly generous or stingy action, I try to think "they are the kind of person who is generous in this situation and stingy in this situation" - and I've noticed improvements in my ability to predict coworkers behaviours since I made that change.
The other thing to remember is that, a la no perfect philosophy student of emptiness, there is no character outside of situation: you can't examine a person's character sans situational modifiers. You can describe people as having this or that character trait, but only insofar as it applies to situations.
Shokwave's read on this is my take away from experiments like Milgram's: the situational context is not truly separable from character. Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect really drove this point home to me. He argued strongly against the idea that the abuses at Abu Ghriab were the result of "bad apples" (i.e. result of people with poor character), but that the situation itself led to the abuses, and further (and more controversially), the situation itself was created in order to bring about those behaviors. I don't mean to say that there is necessarily only one behavioral outcome for a given situation, only that the situation weighs very heavily on the outcome, to the point where finding an unchangeable "character" across situations doesn't seem feasible.