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

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. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the promise of a personality-based approach to the study of moral (ethical) behavior, and to its opposite – immoral behavior. That is, our goals are to articulate and evaluate the added unique value that a personality approach can bring to the study of moral behavior. We will present a conceptual foundation for such an approach, and we will examine fundamental empirical evidence bearing on the value of such an approach. We believe there are at least three reasons to investigate morality from a personality perspective. First, the question of what drives and determines moral behavior has occupied thinkers for thousands of years, originally in the field of philosophy, relatively recently in psychology and other fields, and at the very beginning of personality psychology. The question of what makes a person behave honestly, fairly, or compassionately, among similar behaviors, has most recently exploded in social psychology, where the main interest is in determining the situational forces that affect morality. However, we propose that much of morality and ethical behavior also may be based on long-standing psychological characteristics that exist within individual persons and on which individuals differ (Hill & Roberts, 2010; Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009), for example, on characteristics such as ideologies, traits, or abiding values, each of which is hard to manipulate in a short-term experiment. A personality approach would investigate those sorts of variables, focusing in particular on whether people differ in morality, how much people differ, how moral characteristics manifest themselves in peoples’ lives, what is the content of moral personality characteristics, and how such characteristics function. However, the very claim that morality is contained to any degree within people has been challenged, especially in philosophical investigations of morality. The nature or existence of individual differences in morality has implications for fundamental questions such as “What is the best ethical theory?” “Do people differ in their degree of morality?” and “What are the characteristics of people that have the most impact on the morality of their actions?”. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd