OU - Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing

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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.

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Now showing 1 - 14 of 14

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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
Getting Back on Track to Being Human
(2017-05-02) Narvaez, Darcia
Cooperation and compassion are forms of intelligence. Their lack is an indication of ongoing stress or toxic stress during development that undermined the usual growth of compassion capacities. Though it is hard to face at first awareness, humans in the dominant culture tend to be pretty unintelligent compared to those from societies that existed sustainably for thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of years. Whereas in sustainable societies everyone must learn to cooperate with earth’s systems to survive and thrive, in the dominant culture this is no longer the case. Now due to technological advances that do not take into account the long-term welfare of earth systems, humans have become “free riders” until these systems collapse from abuse or misuse. The dominant human culture, a “weed species,” has come to devastate planetary ecosystems in a matter of centuries. What do we do to return ourselves to living as earth creatures, as one species among many in community? Humanity needs to restore lost capacities—relational attunement and communal imagination—whose loss occurs primarily in cultures dominated by child-raising practices and ways of thinking that undermine cooperative companionship and a sense of partnership that otherwise develops from the beginning of life. To plant the seeds of cooperation, democracy, and partnership, we need to provide the evolved nest to children, and facilitate the development of ecological attachment to their landscape. This will take efforts at the individual, policy, and institutional levels.
Open Access
Giving from the Heart: The Role of the Heart and the Brain in Virtuous Motivation and Integrity
(2016-05-07) Karns, Christina; Skorburg, Joshua
To what extent and in what way is the self unified? How does its degree of unification lead to or stymie virtuous motivation and action? This project investigates embodied fluency in value-directed-actions and a drive toward integrity – an alignment between our explicitly endorsed values and automatic responses or actions. Our conceptual model operationalizes integrity as the interaction between implicit associations and automaticity of virtuous actions with self-reported explicit values endorsed by the self, with embodied responses serving as a mediator between integrity and behavior. Prediction 1: If generous values are explicitly endorsed by the self, then generous values should predict deliberative giving behavior. Prediction 2: If generous values are or have become habituated and automatic in some individuals, then implicit associations should predict automatic giving behavior. Prediction 3: Embodied measures of autonomic stress responses and neural reward will assess separate aspects of acting in accord with values. In addition to testing the local associations between measurement domains, the multimodal dataset we will acquire (self-report, implicit association tests, response times, autonomic physiology, electroencephalography) will allow us to statistically test our initial working model of integrated virtue. In this presentation, we will address our progress on data acquisition as well as our progress on a collaborative theory paper. We will reflect on the development of our project from the initial proposal, through feedback from the SMV core project team, up to the present data acquisition and analysis stage and discuss specific issues - both challenging and promising - that have cropped up in this development, as well as some broader themes for research at the interface of neuroscience and moral philosophy.
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
Motivating the Self to Virtue in Western and non-Western Countries: Does Nation or Faith Matter More?
(2016-05-06) Ferrari, Michel; Bang, Hyeyoung
Our international project involves interviews with older and younger adults of 4 faith conditions (Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Agnostic) in 2 countries, Canada and South Korea. Study 1 includes participants from two age groups at opposite ends of adulthood: (1) emerging adults (age 18-25) and (2) retired older adults (age 65-85) (N=240). Each participant is interviewed twice. In the first interview, participants explain their understanding of virtue in their own lives and those of people they admire, and whether they consider their moral exemplars wise. Participants also complete self-report questionnaires about religious faith, wisdom, self-construal, personal values and quality of life; finally, they nominate a religious authority (or, for agnostics, a community leader) they consider wise, who form the subject pool for Study 2. Since personal faith needs support from faithful communities, the second interview takes a more communal perspective on motivation to virtue: participants first complete the Multiplayer Simulation for Researching Effective Interpersonal Dynamics to shows how they make more or less wise decisions about dynamic, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous situations; participants then speculate more broadly on themes of nation and community and the role of faith in contributing to social and communal well-being. Study 2 further explores these issues with religious authorities and community leaders in both countries (N=120). Preliminary analyses compare interview data with questionnaire measures of self, motivation, and virtue. Narratives about exemplary others are used to illuminate participants’ own standards and expectations. The goal is to explore the cultural determinants and universality of virtue, and how understandings of virtue commonly shared within national cultures interact with personal wisdom, stage in life, and religious faith.
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, Desire, and Virtue in Romantic Relationships: A Novel Integration of Buddhist Philosophy and Relationship Science
(2016-05-06) Condon, Paul; Dunne, John; Wilson-Mendenhall, Christine
Our project aims to study the interplay of self, desire, virtue, and flourishing in the relational contexts that characterize daily life. This presentation will focus on the initial seeds that have blossomed from deep integration of Buddhist philosophy with current literature in relationship science during Year 1 of this project. Much empirical research indicates that close, caring relationships are a key to flourishing, but less is known about the psychological functioning or context that promotes caring behaviors. Buddhist philosophy offers a unique perspective that focuses on mental states instead of behaviors, suggesting that the psychological context of intention is critical for understanding the expression of virtue in relationships. In particular, Buddhist traditions suggest that wisdom and compassion foster the virtuous mental states that underlie interpersonal flourishing. In this talk, we will discuss ways in which the Buddhist framework of wisdom and compassion integrates and advances current relationship theory and findings. We will also present our efforts to develop and pilot a key methodological approach for studying complex mental states in daily life. Finally, we will discuss our approach for Year 2 of this project, which will empirically test the Buddhist framework in the context of romantic relationships using a multi-method approach that assesses first-person experience, behavior, and peripheral psychophysiology.
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.
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
The Virtue of Self-Distancing
(2016-05-07) Herold, Warren; Sowden, Walter
One develops a moral self, according to Adam Smith, by examining one’s feelings and behavior from a spectators’ point of view. Our first study examines this claim by asking participants to split $10 between themselves and a confederate in any way they deem fit. Prior to deciding, participants were randomly assigned to reflect on their decision from a self-immersed, 1st person perspective or a self-distanced, observer perspective. Contrary to our predictions, analyses performed on the data collected thus far (n = 77) suggest that participants in the self-distanced group keep significantly more money (on average, $1) for themselves, U = 933, z = 2.35. p = .019, r = .27. Although, preliminary (data collection remains ongoing) these results are both fascinating and perplexing. We are currently revisiting our original theory and developing two follow-up experiments to help us explain this interesting and counterintuitive finding.
Open Access
Virtues as Properly Motivated, Self-integrated Traits
(2016-05-07) Fowers, Blaine
We begin by discussing the elements of properly assessed virtue traits that we are studying, including proper motivation, self-integration, continuity over time, and behavioral manifestation. We are documenting the virtues of kindness and fairness with experience sampling, experimental, and interview methods to test 19 hypotheses. Our initial study is an experimental test of whether trait kindness predicts behavioral helping behavior. We will present the results of this study. The primary study uses experience sampling methods (ESM) to assess kind and fair behavior over a 14-day period, with four assessments per day. Each assessment contains multiple measures of behavior, motivation, self-integration, and situational variables. The ESM study will assess the “traitness” of kindness and fairness by examining consistency over time, individual differences, and the degree of integration of behavior, motivation, and self-processes. We are currently pilot testing the measures for this study. Primary sample data collection begins in June. Following this study, we will select 10 extreme cases for narrative interviews on kindness and fairness. Our final study is an experimental test of whether trait fairness predicts behavioral fairness. In terms of timeline, we added two studies necessary to fulfill our objectives, which we will describe. We are slightly behind schedule with the ESM study, but we will complete the project on time. We will report on our very positive experience with deep integration that is built on the long-standing relationship between the Principal Investigators. Our biggest challenge is that Professor Cokelet is leaving the University of Miami. We have three forms of deliverables at this point. We have conducted two research workshops at the University of Miami (intensive longitudinal research and interdisciplinary research). We have a Psychology Today blog entitled “Questions of Character.” We have a national conference presentation of our kindness experiment scheduled for August, 2016.
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
Whole trait theory: Does it work for virtue?
(2016-05) Fleeson, William; Jayawickreme, Eranda
Nearly a century after the first blow landed for the situationist argument, Whole Trait Theory was offered as a new model of traits, one that benefited from the situationists’ points. Whole Trait Theory argued that there are robust, global traits that are highly predictive of how people act, yet that people are highly responsive to situations and frequently change the personalities they exhibit. Empirical evidence in favor of Whole Trait Theory has been accumulating over the past several years – at least in so far as it applies to normal personality traits (traits that are not obviously virtues or character traits). Given that the situationist argument found new life in its incarnation as a criticism of global virtues, it is natural to wonder whether Whole Trait Theory can also fend off situationism for the case of the virtues. In this talk we present Whole Trait Theory, which offers a detailed model of traits that, inter alia, provides an optimistic view on the existence of broad, robust traits. Whole Theory does not conceive of traits as essential, permanent, and unwavering. It considers self-concepts, scripts, schemas, narratives, goals, motives, and other similar constructs as drivers of traits. Moreover, given that personality change does in fact occur, it proposes that individuals may be able to have an influence on how they change. We further propose that Whole Trait Theory may represent an exciting new avenue for interdisciplinary collaboration for studying virtue, as well as a basis for a richly developed psychological theory that could defend its position in favor of virtue ethics.