How and why people want to be more moral

Abstract

What types of moral improvements do people wish to make? Do they hope to become more good, or less bad? Do they wish to be more caring? More honest? More loyal? And why exactly do they want to become more moral? Presumably, most people want to improve their morality because this would benefit others, but is this in fact their primary motivation? Here, we begin to investigate these questions. Across two large, preregistered studies (N = 1,818), participants provided open-ended descriptions of one change they could make in order to become more moral; they then reported their beliefs about and motives for this change. In both studies, people most frequently expressed desires to improve their compassion and more often framed their moral improvement goals in terms of amplifying good behaviors than curbing bad ones. The strongest predictor of moral motivation was the extent to which people believed that making the change would have positive consequences for their own well-being. Together, these studies provide rich descriptive insights into how ordinary people want to be more moral, and show that they are particularly motivated to do so for their own sake.

Which positive personality traits do people want to change?

“…This conclusion aligns well with recent findings on the question of why people want to become more moral. Sun et al (2023) found that the extent to which people believe that changes would benefit their well-being was the best predictor of their motivation to increase moral traits. Our findings support their interpretation that the belief that one will become happier as a result of changing one's personality traits is an important mechanism to be considered in studying volitional personality change.…”

Why moral psychology needs personality psychology

“…Following comprehensive investigations of the structure of personality based on lexical studies of thousands of personality trait descriptors (Allport & Odbert, 1936; John et al., 2008; Saucier & Goldberg, 1996), personality psychology also offers established trait taxonomies that can be used as organizing frameworks (Bainbridge et al., 2022; Irwing et al., 2023). For example, Sun and colleagues (2024) use dimensions from the Big Five facets, VIA character strengths, and MFT to categorize people's moral improvement goals. Illustrating the limitations of the dominant MFT framework, goals reflected all 20 categories (as well as an “Other” category), including 15 categories that are not represented in MFT (e.g., honesty, bravery, productiveness).…”

“…Fleeson and colleagues (2024) and Helzer and colleagues (2024) use nomination procedures that enable the study of those who are perceived as being moral exemplars in general, or within an MBA classroom. Sun and colleagues (2024) use open‐ended responses to comprehensively describe people's ordinary concepts of moral improvement. Baumert and colleagues (2024) use the experience sampling method to capture real‐world instances of moral courage when people are confronted with others' norm violations.…”

“…What kinds of moral improvement goals do people have, and what predicts their desire to make these changes? Drawing on methods for studying volitional personality change (Baranski et al., 2017), Sun and colleagues (2024) elicited open‐ended, idiographic descriptions of people's moral improvement goals, and examined predictors of motivation to make these changes. Controlling for the content of these goals, people were more motivated to make changes to the extent that they believed that the change was within their control and would benefit others.…”