OU - Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing

Permanent URI for this community

https://hdl.handle.net/11244/22701

About the Institute

The Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing is an academic center based at The University of Oklahoma. Its three-fold mission is to:

Advance the science of virtue both by promoting virtue research at OU and by serving as a central hub for other institutes, both in the U.S. and abroad, to facilitate collaborative research initiatives;
Improve the flourishing of OU students by revitalizing both the study and cultivation of virtue as part of the mission of higher education;
Improve the flourishing of all Oklahomans through our outreach programs in a variety of areas: to business, education, civic engagement, and parents.

Repository

Part of the Institute's mission is to offer a wide variety of resources for those interested in human flourishing, virtue and character. This repository provides a permanent home for those resources, and is updated regularly with new resources as they become available. We invite you to join our email list and connect with us on social media to stay informed of new resources, upcoming events and funding opportunities.

Moral Self Archive

The ISHF repository also hosts the Moral Self Archive, a freely available repository of moral self research, 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.

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 35

Open Access
The Beacon Project: Jump-starting a Field of the Morally Exceptional
(2015-07) Fleeson, William
Open Access
Can there be a virtue ethics of institutions?
(2015-01) Cordell, Sean
I consider this question in light of Slote’s proposal for an ‘agent-based’ account of social justice, on which we can evaluate a society in terms of the morally virtuous motives being expressed in the ‘actions’ of laws, institutions and customs. I first motivate Slote’s project, then present two interpretations of his account: one which assesses the actual or apparently manifest motives of a sufficient number of individuals who instantiate social and political institutions, and one where social and political institutions are thought of as discrete agents which themselves express or reflect quasi-motives , aside from any particular individual’s actual or apparent motive. I argue that both of these formulations of the agent-based picture of social justice meet the same problem. For example, with regard to individuals’ motives, what would count as the good or virtuous motive qua political participant or representative can only be properly specified by prior reference to the expectations attached to particular social or political roles. Having exposed the problems in the agent-based approach, I end by considering whether and to what extent it generalizes and threatens to hamper any kind of virtue ethical project in social and political philosophy.
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
The Dignity of Persons and the Value of Uniqueness
(2016-11) Zagzebski, Linda
Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred thirteenth Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, IL, on March 4, 2016.
Metadata only
Eudaimonic Growth: How Virtues and Motives Shape the Narrative Self and Its Development within a Social Ecology
(2016-05) Bauer, Jack; DesAutels, Peggy
This project investigates how virtues shape people’s life stories within a social ecology of families, social institutions, and cultural master narratives. Life stories allow us to study how virtues serve as motives for action, as themes in a person’s self-identity, and as reflections of cultural belief systems. In this talk we show how life stories portray eudaimonic growth, that is, the development of virtues like wisdom, compassion, authenticity, and self-actualization. We pay special attention to eudaimonic growth in non-idealized circumstances, notably gender inequities of social power and expectations, whether in the family or at work. We are studying these topics in two phases. Phase I, currently in progress, involves life story interviews with 100 adults. First these participants complete an online personality survey that focuses on eudaimonic virtues like wisdom, perspective-taking, compassion, gratitude, moral orientations, and transcending self-interest. Our research team then conducts a life story interview of two-to-three hours with each of these participants. Phase II, in the next academic year, focuses on family stories—interviews with 50 of the target individuals and 2-to-3 family members, all of whom also take an online personality survey, as in Phase I. All interviews are transcribed and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. These participants are also part of a larger, longitudinal study of University of Dayton alumni. Thus we expect to gain a better understanding of how virtues shape life stories within a social ecology of family and cultural master narratives in the current two years—and how life stories predict eudaimonic growth in the decades to come.
Open Access
Eudaimonic Growth: How Virtues and Motives Shape the Narrative Self and Its Development within a Social Ecology
(2015-03-14) Bauer, Jack; DesAutels, Peggy
This transdisciplinary study will examine how the narration of self, motivation, and eudaimonic virtues like wisdom and compassion develop within a social ecology of family master narratives and social institutions that either foster or constrain the development of such virtues. Drawing from a larger, longitudinal study of character development and life stories in adulthood, we will interview individuals and their families about virtue-relevant events in life, such as conflicts of belief (intrapersonally, interpersonally, and institutionally), virtue-focused projects and activities, and self- and family-defining memories. Narratives will be analyzed qualitatively and critically as well as quantitatively and in relation to other measures of eudaimonic and personal development. We expect that specific virtues will serve as motivational themes in personal and family stories and that these narrative themes will predict specific paths of virtuous self-development. We further expect that specific inequalities in family and social-institutional contexts will correspond to specific conflicts in the development of eudaimonic qualities in individuals’ lives.
Open Access
Existential Feelings in Virtue: A Philosophical-Psychological Investigation
(2015-03-14) Sullivan, Daniel; Achim, Stephan
Discourses on the self and virtue have minimized the importance of emotion in favor of cognitive-developmental perspectives. Yet recent theory and research in philosophy (Kristjánsson, 2010; Slaby & Stephan, 2008) and psychology (Haidt, 2008) find that affect plays a constitutional role in the self, moral judgments, and virtuous behavior. A class of affective phenomena called existential feelings has been identified as vital to self-understanding and motivation (Ratcliffe, 2008; Slaby, Paskaleva, & Stephan, 2014). The present interdisciplinary project investigates the significance of such feelings as a motivational link between the self and virtue. In five studies using cross-disciplinary, innovative methods, we will determine whether positive existential feelings support a sense of emotional connection to others that bolsters virtues of courage, humanity, and transcendence. We will further determine whether existential feelings are negatively impacted by the aging process, and whether this process can be altered to increase virtue in older adults.
Open Access
Humility as Opening to Others: Exemplar-Mediated Reconfigurations of the Self
(2016-05-06) Spezio, Michael; Roberts, Robert
The talk will engage distinctive contributions of the virtue of humility to the communal life of L’Arche communities, and of these communities’ practices to our understanding of humility. Long-term, dedicated Assistants in L’Arche feature a remarkable and special kind of openness to other members that facilitates loving encounter consistent with Jean Vanier’s writings on Christian love. The practices in L’Arche work against vices of pride such as arrogance, conceit, snobbishness, and self-righteousness, which all derive from egoistic, atomistic barriers to spiritual communion. These barriers are shields, partitions, divides between persons, counter to the relationships that characterize life in L’Arche. While more or less expected or typical in most human relationships and human systems, there is a striking absence of these dividers in L’Arche. We propose that this absence facilitates what humility is when combined with love: an openness to perceiving and valuing self and other together, in conformity with the mind of the exemplar. The ontology, or fundamental teleological nature of the self that justifies and makes humility possible, in combination with love, is that the self is essentially self-transcendent. In particular, it is made to transcend itself “into” the other, for the sake of the other, in benevolent service. It is also that the value that the vices of pride prescribe for the self is false. We will present several empirical lines of evidence expanding on this analysis. Bayesian cognitive modeling and model selection show that senior L’Arche Assistants unite their self-valuation with their valuing of others in decisions that are both courageous and conventionally costly. Linguistic analyses show that Assistants semantically join valuation of self and other, compared to a control group that is matched for self-reported gender, empathy, prosociality, and personality. Finally, we will present preliminary neuroimaging investigations using dense array EEG to determine whether these reconfigured models of the self associate with default-mode and perceptual networks in the brain.
Open Access
Integrity and its Puzzles
(2017-05) Herdt, Jennifer
This article was originally published in the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project’s e-Newsletter 08, May 2017.
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
"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
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 Motivation to Love: Overcoming Spiritual Violence and Sacramental Shame in Christian Churches
(2016-05-07) Moon, Dawne; Tobin, Theresa
Our project examines the movement among conservative Christians to change the conversation around gender, sexuality, sin and love, and to even affirm LGBT identities and sometimes even same-sex marriage. Using one poignant example, we will illustrate how our research has allowed us to develop our thought around our three initial research questions. Our first question pertained to the nature of shame, and how shame is treated differently for LGBT members in conservative churches. We will discuss our latest developments in thinking about the healthy role of shame and how shame malfunctions when applied to LGBT identities and practices as if these are sins. We argue that the toxic effects of sacramental shame make the case that sexual and gender differences are not sinful. Our research addresses questions of broad social interest about what shame is, its value, and its toxic distortions. While healthy shame is the desire to preserve social bonds, and sin creates a rupture in those social bonds, treating homosexuality and transgenderness as sin attacks LGBT people’s capacity to relate to others. Our second question asked how LGBT conservative Christians overcome the violence of sacramental shame. We will discuss the ways that claiming LGBT identity helps conservative Christians to resist the sin narrative so that they can relate wholly to other people without fearing their very capacity to do so. Our third question asked what motivates heterosexual/cisgender conservative Christians to end spiritually violent practices and to love more authentically. Surpassing our original hypothesis that “relationship” in Buber’s sense was what makes the difference, we will discuss how our findings shed light on the distinction between objectifying and relational love.
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
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.
Open Access
A Personal-Projects Approach to Well-Being and Virtue: Philosophical and Psychological Considerations
(2016-05-07) DeYoung, Colin; Tiberius, Valerie
Philosophical theories of well-being are diverse and often in disagreement, but we believe progress can be made by starting from an assertion that we think all such theories can agree on—namely, that success in at least some of one’s personal projects (such as in relationships, occupation, or education) is crucial for well-being. We also believe that a useful perspective on virtue is that it reflects qualities that aid one in pursuing personal projects or in helping others to pursue theirs (taking into account possible conflicts between these two options). We marry this philosophical approach to a psychological investigation of the development of virtue and its association with well-being. We use a new theory of personality (Cybernetic Big Five Theory) to specify the psychological contents of personal projects, which we measure using Personal Projects Analysis (PPA), a method specifically designed to assess individuals’ idiosyncratic projects. We are studying 200 undergraduates assessed three times over two years, in an attempt to answer two questions. (1) What are the proximal mechanisms underlying the development of virtue? Does commitment to virtue-involving personal projects (such as friendship) make young adults more likely to develop the virtues that are related to those projects? How do culturally constrained goals (such as being a good friend) get translated into action; do these actions include the development of virtues as subgoals or higher-order goals? (2) How is virtue tied to changes in well-being? Does virtue lead to greater success in personal projects or to the adoption of more virtuous personal projects, and are these outcomes associated with greater subjective well-being? We will discuss the challenges we have faced in conceptualizing and designing the study, as well as our progress thus far.
Open Access
Philosophy, Theoretical Psychology, and Empirical Research: Is Mutual Enrichment Possible and Desirable?
(2017-03-10) Cokelet, Bradford; Fowers, Blaine
This presentation was given by Dr. Blaine Fowers and Dr. Bradford Cokelet at the 2017 Annual Mid-Winter Meeting of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. It is based on reflections from their own scholarly collaboration on the research project, "Virtues as Properly Motivated, Self-Integrated Traits," supported by a grant from Templeton Religion Trust, through the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project.
Open Access
Self and Desire as Seeds of Virtue
(2015-03-14) Condon, Paul; Dunne, John; Wilson-Mendenhall, Christine; Hasenkamp, Wendy; Quigley, Karen; Barrett, Lisa
According to Buddhist philosophies, recognizing the self as impermanent, changing, and interdependent is at the root of virtue. With this realization, desires shift away from inward self-cherishing and toward outward self-transcending (e.g., for others to be happy and free from suffering). This altruistic outlook underlies virtuous action and flourishing. Our primary research question asks: 1) to what extent do people experience self-transcending and self-cherishing desires in everyday life, and 2) to what extent do these different desires predict behaviors and body physiology that underlie virtue and well-being. As highlighted by the SMV project, one challenge involves measuring both intention and action. To overcome this challenge, we propose a multimethodological study that will integrate firstperson experiences of desires (which reflect intention), secondperson reports from close others (i.e., romantic part-ners), and thirdperson laboratory measures of prosocial behavior and body physiology that underlie virtue and flourishing in the context of social relationships (i.e., with one’s romantic part-ner). We will use an “experience sampling” method delivered via a smartphone app to capture psychological desires in daily life. In the laboratory, we will examine if desires in daily life are related to prosocial behavior and physiological synchrony during face-to-face social interactions with a romantic partner. Theoretically, we anticipate that integration of Buddhist philosophy into Western psychology research will encourage more emphasis on the deep psychological desires (e.g., for wealth, recognition, esteem, social connection) that appear to continually drive behavior (v. emphasis on surface desires, food, alcohol, sex). Empirically, we predict that frequent self-transcending desires in daily life will be related to prosocial behavior and physiological synchrony during interactions with romantic partners. Going forward, this project will provide the foundation for future work examining how the moral self can be shaped through contemplative practice (e.g. compassion and or mindfulness meditation) in everyday life.
Open Access
The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project Newsletter 02
(2015-07) 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
The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project Newsletter 04
(2016-01) 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.