Character: The Prospects for a Personality‐Based Perspective on Morality

Abstract

In the early parts of the 20th century, character made up a major part of psychology, specifically of personality psychology. However, an influential observational study of children's moral behavior, conducted by Hartshorne, May, and colleagues in the 1920s, suggested that consistency in morality‐related behavior was lower than many people expected. Some psychologists interpreted such results to mean that there was no consistency in moral behavior and thus that there were no stable, meaningful individual differences in moral behavior – character did not exist. Recent years have witnessed a reinvigoration of character, ethics, and morality as objects of psychological study. Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to this reinvigoration by reviewing the use of the concept of “character” within psychology, considering whether the evidence supports the notion of moral character as a psychological construct, and suggesting new prospects for research on moral character.

Religion, Spirituality, and Thriving: Transcendent Narrative, Virtue, and Telos

“…Some positive strides have been made in recent years. For example, Fleeson, Furr, Jayawickreme, Meindl, and Helzer () reviewed the various conceptualization of character and virtue in personality science and advocate for a definition whereby character strengths “are those characteristics that are descriptive of actions, cognitions, emotions, and motivations that are considered to be relevant to right and wrong according to a relevant moral standard” (p. 181). However, critics of virtue and character constructs bemoan the “bag of virtues” approach, lack of attention to moral identity and purpose, and decontextualized measurement (Nucci, ).…”

“…Similarly, Fleeson et al. () propose that psychologists must attend to moral intentions when defining virtue. For instance, self‐regulation, emotional intelligence, or other abilities are highly functional capacities that can be used to pursue moral, immoral, or amoral goals.…”

“…The depth of engagement with the self elucidated by Kristj ansson requires that narrative identity be incorporated into a psychological understanding of virtue. Similarly, Fleeson et al (2014) propose that psychologists must attend to moral intentions when defining virtue. For instance, self-regulation, emotional intelligence, or other abilities are highly functional capacities that can be used to pursue moral, immoral, or amoral goals.…”

Measures of Values and Moral Personality

“…Examining social-cognitive mechanisms underlying moral traits, how moral traits change over time, and how such change can be positively facilitated (e.g. Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009) has both important theoretical and practical implications (see Fleeson et al, 2014).…”

Phronesis, Virtues and the Developmental Science of Character

“…Whole trait theory attempts to integrate trait and social cognitive approaches to personality, and it makes a claim for understanding neoAristotelian conceptions of virtue (Jayawickreme & Fleeson, 2017). The challenge of situationism has focused the attention of social-personality psychologists and empirical philosophers alike (e.g., Doris, Stich, Phillips & Walmsley, 2017;Fairweather & Alfano, 2013;Fleeson, Furr, Jayawickreme, Meindl & Helzer, 2014). Indeed, what philosophers make of cross-situational consistency of global character traits often hinges on how they read the research literatures of social, cognitive and personality psychology (Alfano, 2011;Doris, 2002;Miller, 2014;Russell, 2011).…”