Moral Self Archive

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/11244/22702

Welcome

The Moral Self Archive is a fully searchable repository, freely available to scholars, students, and the general public. It was originally created and managed by the Self, Motivation and Virtue Project. The SMV Project was a 3-year initiative (Sept. 2014 - March 2018), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, that supported innovative, interdisciplinary research on virtue and moral development, with a special focus on exploring new ways of measuring virtue and how it develops in humans. Visit the SMV Project website for more details. The Moral Self Archive is now managed by the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing.

The SMV Project was funded by generous support from the Templeton Religion Trust and the University of Oklahoma.

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If you are interested in submitting work to the Moral Self Archive, please contact Dr. Nancy Snow (nsnow@ou.edu).

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 59

Open Access
The Co-Construction of Virtue: Epigenetics, Development, and Culture
(2014) Narvaez, Darcia
Chapter from the book "Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology." Ed. Nancy E. Snow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Open Access
Can Virtue Be Measured?
(2014-01) Wright, Jennnifer
In addressing this question, I will define “virtue” as the possession of (a set of) virtue-relevant traits (e.g., honesty, compassion, bravery, generosity, etc.) – “traits” being defined as trait-appropriate cognitive/affective/behavioral responses that are consistently triggered by trait-relevant stimuli in the person’s environment – along with the chronic accessibility of trait-oriented values/goals and trait-relevant identity attributes. Given this account, I explain in this paper how the empirical study of virtue involves the measurement of four things: (1) people’s sensitivity to the presence of (external/internal) trait-relevant stimuli; (2) people’s recognition/generation of trait-appropriate (cognitive/affective/behavioral) responses; (3) the dispositionality of the connection between 1 and 2; and (4) the chronic accessibility of trait-oriented values/goals and trait-relevant identity. The first can be operationalized as people’s ability to perceive (visual/auditory), identify, and generate trait-relevant stimuli; the second, as people’s recognition of both self and other trait-appropriate cognitive/affective/behavioral responses, in naturalistic and artificial/controlled environments – as well as their live/spontaneous generation of the same. “Dispositionality” can be operationally defined along two dimensions: consistency and habituality. Finally, chronic accessibility of trait-oriented values/goals can be operationally defined as people’s explicit/implicit identification of trait-oriented values/goals as important. - See more at: http://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/474/library#sthash.3FAg81SV.dpuf
Open Access
Virtue Intelligence
(2014-01) Snow, Nancy
The provocative title of this conference is, “Can Virtue Be Measured?” My answer to this question is, “Yes, it can,” and I hasten to add, “It should be.” I began thinking about whether and how to measure virtue when Jennifer Cole Wright, a psychologist from the College of Charleston, and I were approached to write a popular book on measuring virtue. Alas, that project didn’t get anywhere, but I hope that our thinking about this issue might yet bear fruit. Central to our thought is a notion suggested to us by one of our prospective editors. That is the idea of virtue intelligence.1 In part I, I sketch arguments for the importance of measuring virtue and sketch how the concept of virtue intelligence might help us to approach this venture. In II, I articulate in more detail what virtue intelligence is, and, in III, situate it within philosophical theories of virtue (here I fear I might depart from the views of my collaborator, but I’ll leave that to her to judge). In IV, I draw upon the thinking that Jen and I have done (mainly Jen’s thought) to briefly discuss what we believe to be some of the most innovative and exciting methodologies for measuring virtue now being explored. Finally, in V, I go out on a limb and suggest something rather different (from which Jen might want to dissociate herself), inspired by my recent reading on the topic of “big data.”
Open Access
2015 Interdisciplinary Moral Forum Program
(2015-03) The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project
Program for the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project's 2015 Interdisciplinary Moral Forum, held on March 12-14, 2015. The Interdisciplinary Moral Forum brought together 57 moral self researchers from around the world and from multiple disciplines. It was held at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Participants included two members from each semi-finalist research team, members of the Core Project Team, and other interested members of the Marquette and Milwaukee academic communities.
Open Access
The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project Newsletter 01
(2015-03) SMV Project
This is the quarterly electronic publication of the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project. It features a lead article, autobiographical sketches of SMV Project research team members, publication announcements, and updates about the SMV Project leadership team.
Open Access
Theatrical Intervention as a Pathway to Moral Virtue Development
(2015-03-13) Wang, Lijuan; Mower, Deborah; Garvey, Margaret
Moral virtue development is grounded in social relationships that foster the socioemotional intelligence underlying moral virtue. Recent research shows a decrease in socioemotional intelligence with implications for moral virtue development. This project is a feasibility study of a theatrical intervention with parent-child dyads to increase socioemotional intelligence and proto-virtuous character by improving parent-child mutual responsiveness. Our theatrical approach combines direct development of mutual responsiveness and practice of moral virtue scripts, providing a powerful and seamless integration of philosophy, theatre art and social science (longitudinal experimental design, measurement, educational intervention, statistical analyses).
Open Access
Investigating Implicit Aspects of Virtue: Understanding Humility Among Moral Exemplars
(2015-03-13) Van Slyke, James; Graves, Mark
Our research project will investigate the virtue of humility among real world humanitarian exemplars, such as holocaust rescuers and hospice workers. We will use computer technology to analyze interviews with these types of populations to understand the different factors involved in the virtue of humility. Following the work of Aristotle, we believe this virtue is formed as a kind of habit that becomes a natural extension of one’s character. We aim to operationalize and empirically evaluate aspects of the virtue of humility through the computational analysis of implicit semantic processing embedded in the narratives of real world humanitarians. Latent semantic analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analysis will be used to map self-understanding schemas in these populations and its role in humility while serving others.
Open Access
Virtues as Properly Motivated, Self-Integrated Traits
(2015-03-13) Fowers, Blaine; Cokelet, Bradford; Laurenceau, Jean-Philippe
Contemporary empirical research on virtues has been promising, but limited in depth and value by investigators’ reliance on global self-report questionnaires obtained at a single time-point. These questionnaires require respondents to summarize their trait features in very broad state-ments or focus narrowly on specific behaviors. Properly understood, virtues are partly constitut-ed by appropriate motivations in response to the real-world environment and integrated with the actor’s self—features that are not accessible using the predominant research methods. Our central aim is to deepen virtue research with intensive longitudinal measurement of virtu-ous activity, which includes behavior, motivation, self-congruence, and situational factors. We will assess participants’ real-world activity four times per day over a 14-day period with respect to two pervasive virtues: fairness and kindness. We will then conduct narrative interviews with a subset of participants about virtue in their lives. We will assess motivation in three ways (goals of the activity, motivation type, and felt motivation at the moment) and the integration of the behavior with the self in three ways (self-congruence with virtue-related behavior, consistency of virtue-related behavior over time, and narrative interviews). These innovative methods will enable us to use cutting-edge psychological methods to investigate sophisticated philosophic questions about whether and how people's capacity for virtuous activity depends on their achieving self-integration - both across time and across personal contexts.
Open Access
"Jihad": What's Happening with this Virtue?
(2015-03-13) Milla, Mirra; El Hafiz, Subhan; Rohman, Izza; Edison, Rizki
"Jihad" for Muslim is a virtue, it’s learned from generation to generation. But nowadays we can see that this virtue has had different interpretations in society, from peaceful to terrorism. This research will be conducted in Indonesia, the place that is known as one of the biggest Islamic communities in the world. The primary research questions are (i) how jihad as a virtue have been shared as an idea in society, and (ii) how motivation to implement this virtue can be very different one to another (iii) what are psychosocial factors that give contribution in implement-ing of these virtue. The study will be conducted in three of study with different methods. The first study aims to explain the variety of the virtue of Jihad that can be derived from Islamic lit-erature. The second study is qualitative-comparative, using a social representation approach, this study will explain the personal and social pattern in understanding of different representations of virtue Jihad and the implementation. The result from the second study will be tested in la-boratory with experimental design which aims to test the different reactions of the brain regard-ing the motivation difference of jihad between person's moral obligatory or emotional inclina-tion on some variation differences group of jihad interpretation. Using Electrical Capacitance Volume Tomography (ECVT) we will record how brain will react in specific situation. This re-search will integrate three disciplines: humanities (theology), social science (psychology and so-ciology), and natural science (physiology and neuroscience) all studying the same virtue, Jihad. The research expected outcomes are to explain the variety of the virtue of Jihad that can be de-rived from Islamic literature, and to describe the representation of virtue of Jihad and its im-plementation on individual level and different type of group in Islamic community in Indonesia.
Open Access
Understanding the Virtue-Relevant Self Through Courage
(2015-03-13) Pury, Cynthia; Starkey, Charles; Sullivan, Emily
To what extent do differences in who we are predict differences in courage? We propose to de-velop a measure of the virtue-relevant self, which is composed of self-conception, social roles, virtue-relevant values, and personality traits. We will then conduct three studies using this meas-ure to determine the extent to which these various components of the virtue-relevant self pre-dict the types of acts people consider courageous as well as the willingness of people to engage in courageous acts themselves. We believe that individual differences in each of these compo-nents – that is, the content of the virtue-relevant self – will correlate with differences in first, how people rate actions that they themselves have undertaken in the past; second, how people rate actions that other people have taken; and third, the willingness of people to take certain kinds of courageous action. If found, these relations will have broader implications for the self and virtues by indicating that traits of the self beyond character traits affect both the conception of virtuous behavior and virtuous behavior itself.
Open Access
Self-Transcendence, Virtue and Happiness: A Psychological Investigation of Buddhist Perspectives on the Self and Well-Being
(2015-03-13) Kesebir, Pelin; Dahl, Cortland; Davidson, Richard; Goldman, Robin
The proposed project aims to study self-identification as a major impediment to virtue and hap-piness, and self-transcendence as a reliable path to higher personal well-being. Approaching age-old philosophical questions using current psychological theorizing and an empirical methodolo-gy, we will put to test Buddhist ideas on the relationship between self, virtue, and happiness (eu-daimonia). In particular, we will study a family of virtues and character strengths that approxi-mate self-transcendence in the Buddhist sense, such as humility, perspective, and a sense of in-terconnectedness with humanity. We plan a three-stage project with distinct contributions at every stage: In the first stage, we will develop implicit, non-self report measures to capture the aforementioned virtues (methodological contribution). The second stage will employ the measures developed in the first stage to investigate the relationship between self-transcendence and well-being (theoretical contribution). Finally, in the third stage, insights from the previous stages will be utilized to create scientifically validated exercises that can help people cultivate virtue and happiness.
Open Access
Personal Projects and the Development of Virtue: How Characteristic Adaptations Enact and Encourage Virtue
(2015-03-13) DeYoung, Colin; Tiberius, Valerie; Syed, Moin
How does the development of virtue play out in the context of personal projects—key elements of identity in which progress is crucial for well-being—such as those related to relationships, vocation, and self-improvement? In a sample of 200 undergraduates, this longitudinal study will investigate how characteristic adaptations (goals, interpretations, and strategies adapted to an individual’s particular life circumstances) develop over time and whether their enaction in the context of personal projects both expresses and leads to the development of virtue. We will use an innovative method called personal projects analysis to assess characteristic adaptations and asso-ciated virtues, and we will test whether a future-authoring intervention, designed to help people envision their ideal future and hone their goals and strategies, facilitates the development of vir-tue. We hypothesize that characteristic adaptations expressed in personal projects predict the development of virtue and that this process can be facilitated by future-authoring. If a brief in-tervention has a measurable effect on the development of virtue, it may provide a powerful tool for improving human life.
Open Access
The Motivation to Love: Overcoming Spiritual Violence and Sacramental Shame in Christian Churches
(2015-03-14) Moon, Dawne; Tobin, Theresa
The Motivation to Love is a collaborative, qualitative study of spiritual violence in Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant churches’ relationships with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Spiritual violence uses religious means to violate a person in her relationship with God. Sacramental shame, which uses shaming practices to try to draw people “closer” to God, is one particularly pervasive kind of spiritual violence directed at LGBT Christians. Our project investigates how the self is harmed by the spiritual violence of sacramental shame and how people—situated differently in relation to this institutional religious harm—acquire the motivation to cultivate such virtues as compassion, hope, and Christian love that can serve as counterforces to this form of violence. We use qualitative sociological methods to collect data about peoples’ experiences of sacramental shame and finding the motivation to love in the face of spiritual violence. By coupling conventional sociological methods of analysis with moral and analytical philosophical frameworks, we will develop an empirically grounded, nuanced account of the character damage this mode of violence can inflict and possibilities for recovery, while simultaneously supporting a moral argument for why this mode of violence is unjust. Among other things, we predict that having a relationship with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender person will provide motivation to rethink conventional church characterizations of sexual difference. We also expect that self-conscious identification as LGBT helps individuals who have been shamed by the church to heal and thrive, regardless of their theological views of same-sex sexual practices.
Open Access
Motivating the Self to Virtue in Western and non-Western Countries: Does Nation or Faith Matter More in the Development of the Moral Self?
(2015-03-14) Ferrari, Michel; Bang, Hyeyoung; Kord Noghabi, Rasool; Ardelt, Monika; Edmondson, Ricca; Connell, Michael; Mongeau, Gilles; Vervaeke, John
‘Self’ has long been a contested term within psychology and religion; however, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism all acknowledge that individuals struggle to embody narratives of a virtuous life—a life motivated to do good, avoid the bad, escape suffering, and help others to do the same. Our international interdisciplinary team plans to interview people from 4 faith conditions (Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and agnostic), in 3 countries (Canada, Iran, and Korea) about their understanding of virtue and how they might attempt to achieve virtue in their own lives. We will also invite participants to comment on classic stories of wisdom in these 3 religious traditions in all 3 countries, acknowledging that these faiths do not regard selves entirely in isolation but see them as needing support from faithful communities. Finally, participants will complete a wis-dom simulation. Although each country contains citizens of different religious faiths, national holidays show that Canada is administratively a Christian nation, Korea is a Buddhist nation and Iran is an Islamic nation. Participants will be invited to give examples of someone they know personally who is living a virtuous life and how they find two kinds of motivation to do so: (1) proximal (e.g., resisting temptation), and (2) lifespan developmental (e.g., daily mindfulness mediation or prayer, or through some deep religious insight, such as Buddhist Satori or Christian Grace). We will also ask participants for examples of their own virtuous behavior and their motivation to virtue. In Study 1, participants will come from two age groups at opposite ends of adulthood, with potentially very different views of the motivations that inspire a virtuous self: (1) emerging adults (age 18-25) and (2) retired older adults (age 60-80) (N=480). Study 2 will further explore these issues with religious authorities in each country, with psychotherapists considered agnostic authorities (N=120). All interviews and coding will be in the official language of each country (Farsi in Iran, English in Canada, Korean in Korea), with coding and analysis overseen by a native speaker of that language on the research team. However, critical incidents and key examples of themes will be translated into English for commentary by the whole team. The goal is to explore the cultural determinants and universality of virtue, and whether understandings of virtue are more commonly shared within national cultures or within religious faiths (i.e., whether Ca-nadian Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and non-religious participants have more in common on the basis of being Canadian, or whether Christians in Iran, Canada, and Korea are more alike based on being Christian and striving to live a life of Christian virtue).
Open Access
Who Am I? Investigating the Moral Self
(2015-03-14) Prinz, Jesse; Gomez-Lavin, Javier; Nichols, Shaun; Stohminger, Nina
Emerging research suggests a crucial link between the self and morality; that is, we define our-selves less by our personality, memory, or agency than by our moral values. Although this work indicates an association between morality and the self, it reveals little about how this association works, and thus the goal of our project is to provide answers to key questions related to respon-sibility, motivation, recognition, and the psychological implementation of the moral self. To explore these questions we intend to use a range of innovative psychological methods, includ-ing: causal modeling of participants’ responses, field research on patients with severe amnesia, and tools from cognitive psychology—such as increased cognitive load—to manipulate attributions of identity, We expect our studies to provide insight both into the mechanisms that lead people to define the self in terms of moral traits and into the relationships between this moral self and other important normative concepts, such as responsibility. In particular we predict that moral identification mediates attributions of responsibility, that the link between the self and identity is dependent on online cognitive processes, and that identification with some set of values increases moral motivation.
Open Access
Motivating Virtuous Selves: The Impact of Gender and Culture
(2015-03-14) Raine, Roxanne; Scheopner, Cynthia; McKinney, Jonathan
The self is defined differently both across and within disciplines and cultures. The traditional Western view of self as an ethical or economic subject is challenged by process philosophers as misplaced and by feminists as incomplete. Multicultural approaches call for a socially-situated self, but even this approach fails Buddhist no/not-self or Daoist selflessness. This philosophical concern parallels psychological studies of identity that have demonstrated different performance results following reminders of personal identity aspects (priming). However, these psychological studies suggest an approach that may avoid the philosophical definitional difficulties. Components, or characteristics, of identity may be evaluated for their tendency to motivate virtuous action in individuals who hold differing views of self. This focus on the components of personal identity shifts the conversation from an ontological deadlock to the efficacy of specific interventions. It also facilitates cross-cultural approaches to applied ethics in fields such as business, medicine or research, where international and interdisciplinary teams are common. Our project invites adults of varying ethnicities and genders to participate in an online adventure. After completing a brief survey with priming questions, they choose their character (avatar) and adventure. Participants then make ethical decisions in virtual narratives and maintain weekly journals. The methodology uses online role-playing, interactive technology, journal textual analysis and data collection technology. As the study will be conducted in the heavily-diversified population of the Hawaiian Islands and beyond, the experiment will have the benefit of comparing eastern and western cultures. We expect to find that people make different ethical calls depending on whether they are primed for gender or culture. We will also explore whether one personal identity component is stronger than the other in motivating virtuous decisions. This project will both extend and add a comparative dimension to research on psychological priming, philosophy of self, virtue, and ethical behavior.
Open Access
The Virtue of Self-Distancing
(2015-03-14) Herold, Warren; Kross, Ethan; Sowden, Walter
According to Adam Smith, developing a moral self requires psychological distance: the ability to adopt a perspective outside of oneself, and then examine and regulate one’s feelings and behavior from that point of view. This developmental account of the self gives rise to a particular conception of virtue: a view of the ideal moral agent as one who feels keenly for others, feels little for herself, and in all cases regulates her conduct from a self-distanced point of view. According to Smith, these aspects of virtue are all related. He claims that one who feels keenly for others will be particularly well suited to acquire a high degree of self-command, and he suggests that the process of self-distanced self-evaluation can itself support the development of a virtuous character by both moderating a person’s emotional reactivity and enhancing their sensitivity to the rights and interests of others (relative to their own). Our project will rigorously test Smith’s claim that adopting a self-distanced perspective enhances one’s sensitivity to the rights and interests of others. Laboratory studies will systematically manipulate whether participants self-distance when reasoning about moral dilemmas, and examine the implications of these manipulations for moral reasoning and behavior. Field studies will complement these lab studies by examining the role that self-distancing plays in moral reasoning and behavior in daily life. Consistent with Smith’s claims, we predict that subjects who are either cued or taught to self-distance will display higher levels of empathy and more altruistic behavior.
Open Access
The Gestation of Virtue: An Examination of How Experiences in the Womb May Build the Moral Self
(2015-03-14) Cortes, Rodolfo; Barragan Sanchez, Evangelina
This project represents an empirical test of the Co-Investigator’s “Life is a Wonder” model of pregnancy (Barragan Sanchez, 2007). The Life is a Wonder model posits that, if an expecting mother construes her coming baby as a gift, they she will attempt to “interact” with the fetus in order to welcome her or him to the social world. This “invitation to be born” comes in the form of massages that the mother carries out whenever she feels that the baby moving in her belly. In anecdotal experiences in her training sessions with expecting mothers, the Co-Investigator has found that reciprocating the baby’s movement causes the baby to continue to move, and that the more the baby moves, the more emotionally attuned she or he is during the first few years of life. Over the long term, these in-utero experiences with reciprocation are thought to build a self that is responsive, empathic, and committed to other humans. As such, this project aims to scientifically test whether it may be possible that the massage that some mothers do on their abdomens in response to their babies’ movements may drive the emergence of the moral self.
Open Access
Self-Control: The Linking of Self, Motivation, and Virtue
(2015-03-14) Cole Wright, Jennifer; Nadelhoffer, Thomas; Goya-Tocchetto, Daniela; Langville, Amy; Struchiner, Noel
The key issue our team will be exploring is the role played by self-control in the development and expression of virtue. In particular, we are interested in the self-regulating function of people’s self-narratives (specifically, the degree to which these narratives weave together virtue-oriented goals and identity attributes). We expect to find that highly virtue-oriented self-narratives help to generate and maintain the motivational structure necessary for virtuous character. In order to test this hypothesis, we will refine and develop measures to investigate the relationship between virtue-relevant mental states/behaviors, general capacities for self-control, and self-narratives. Having developed the requisite psychometric tools, we will then extend our research by exploring the relationship between self-control, self-narrative, and virtue cross-culturally. By comparing Americans and Brazilians, we hope to determine whether general self-control and self-narratives play a consistent and stable role in the development of virtue (or whether there are instead important cultural differences). Finally, we will rely upon recent advances made in computational linguistics to explore how people think and talk about virtue. Our goal at this final stage is two-fold: First, we want to explore the underlying semantic and syntactical structure of people’s self-narratives and the relationship between how people think and talk about self-control and how they behave. Second, we want to develop therapeutic writing tools for shaping and changing people’s self-narratives in the hopes that these changes will in turn improve self-control and facilitate virtuous behavior (in children, adolescents, and adults). In this respect, our project has a descriptive element as well as a prescriptive element.
Open Access
The Neuroscience of Habituated Motivation
(2015-03-14) Masala, Alberto; Andler, Daniel; Denizeau, Jean
This project brings together neo-Aristotelian theory of motivational habituation and neuro-cognitive models of skill acquisition, in order to explain why it is so difficult to cultivate extended and sophisticated motivational habits that would not be so easily defeated by akrasia or other unduly situational influences. We will apply Bayesian models of social cognition to the acquisition of moral competences. Bayesian architectures have the virtue of explaining how we unconsciously minimize sophistication in order to reduce bioenergetic costs of learning. But while we prefer heuristic and narrow context-locked skills, sometimes, when environmental conditions justify it, we are able to invest in learning subtle and sophisticated patterns. Elucidating this ambivalent attitude in Bayesian terms will shed light on typical obstacles and unexplored opportunities for the cultivation of sophisticated motivational habits. The team is composed by philosophers working on the naturalization of virtue and computa-tional neuroscientists specializing in motivation.