Consensus, controversy, and chaos in the attribution of characteristics to the morally exceptional

Abstract

ObjectiveWhat do people see as distinguishing the morally exceptional from others? To handle the problem that people may disagree about who qualifies as morally exceptional, we asked subjects to select and rate their own examples of morally exceptional, morally average, and immoral people.MethodSubjects rated each selected exemplar on several enablers of moral action and several directions of moral action. By applying the logic underlying stimulus sampling in experimental design, we evaluated perceivers’ level of agreement about the characteristics of the morally exceptional, even though perceivers rated different targets.ResultsAcross three studies, there was strong subjective consensus on who is morally exceptional: those who are empathetic and prone to guilt, those who reflect on moral issues and identify with morality, those who have self‐control and actually enact moral behaviors, and those who care about harm, compassion, fairness, and honesty. Deep controversies also existed about the moral directions pursued by those seen as morally exceptional: People evaluated those who pursued similar values and made similar decisions more favorably.ConclusionStrong consensus suggests characteristics that may push a person to go beyond normal expectations, that the study of moral exceptionality is not overly hindered by disagreement over who is morally exceptional, and that there is some common ground between disagreeing camps.

Paragons of character—Character strengths and well‐being of moral, creative, and religious exemplars

“…Thus, overall, the results confirmed the expectations that these groups indeed represent paragons for specific strengths of character, not only by the objective criteria but also by their self-ratings. The results for awardees also align well with the traits of morally exceptional individuals as identified in a recent study (Fleeson et al, 2023): These individuals exhibited characteristics such as empathy and compassion (kindness), fairness (fairness), honesty (honesty), and self-control (self-regulation).…”

“…This idea is also mirrored in the exemplar methodologythe approach assumes that the characteristics observed exist in the general population, they are simply displayed more intensely or more frequently and consistently by the exemplars (Bronk, 2012). As recently demonstrated by Fleeson et al (2023), despite differences in values such as religiosity, there is a relatively strong consensus among people about the characteristics that distinguish moral exemplars from morally average and immoral individuals.…”

Why moral psychology needs personality psychology

“…These include the development of taxonomies of character strengths and virtues within positive psychology (Peterson & Seligman, 2004); demonstrations that within-person inconsistency in moral behavior can be reconciled with stable mean differences between people (Bleidorn & Denissen, 2015;Fleeson et al, 2014;Meindl et al, 2015); evidence of interjudge agreement on moral character (Bader et al, 2022;Helzer et al, 2014); the demonstration of robust associations between personality traits, ideology, and indicators of intergroup prejudice (Duckitt, 2001;Jost et al, 2008;Sibley & Duckitt, 2008); systematic efforts to map personality traits onto prosocial preferences for fairness and cooperation in economic games (Thielmann et al, 2020;Zhao & Smillie, 2015); links between personality traits and inclinations toward deontological and consequentialist moral judgments (Kroneisen & Heck, 2020;Smillie et al, 2021); the increasing prominence of the HEXACO taxonomy, which includes a sixth, morally loaded domain (honesty-humility) thought to lie beyond the Big Five (Ashton et al, 2014); and growing interest in "dark" traits (e.g., narcissism, machiavellianism, psychopathy, and "D") and their links with various unethical behaviors (Moshagen et al, 2018;Muris et al, 2017;Zettler et al, 2020). Also noteworthy are influential programs funded by the John Templeton Foundation focused on the Science of Character, specific moral virtues (including generosity, love, honesty, and gratitude), and the Beacon Project for the study of moral exceptionality (which supported three of the contributions to this special issue; Fleeson et al, 2024;Helzer et al, 2024;Pringle et al, 2024).…”

“…As a notable exception, MFT has highlighted the importance of individual differences in the extent to which people base their moral judgments on considerations of harm/care, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, and purity (Graham et al, 2016). On the other hand, there is clearly more to moral personality beyond how people judge right from wrong (Fleeson et al, 2024). How can we begin to specify all relevant constructs and levels of analysis for a comprehensive personality psychology of morality?…”

What is the moral person like? An examination of the shared and unique perspectives on moral character

“…Nonmoral personality traits • Agreeableness and conscientiousness have been described as "the classic dimensions of character" (McCrae & John, 1992) • Honesty-humility has sometimes been interpreted as "integrity" (Szirmák & De Raad, 1994), "trustworthiness" (Di Blas & Forzi, 1998), or "morality" (John et al, 1988) • There is conceptual overlap between our measurement of moral character and the domains of Big Five agreeableness (kindness) and Honesty-Humility (fairness, honesty, trustworthiness) • People tend to rate extraversion and neuroticism as being less morally relevant (Sun & Goodwin, 2020) • People do not believe that improving facets of their extraversion and neuroticism would improve their morality much (Sun & Berman, under review) Moral behavior and values • Self-reports of Honesty-Humility and guilt-proneness were both positively related to prosocial behavior across a variety of games, and both self-and informant reports of Honesty-Humility predicted allocations during a dictator game (Thielmann et al, 2020) • Informant reports had unique predictive validity (beyond self-reports) for fairness in the dictator game (Thielmann et al, 2017) • It is an open question as to whether certain values are especially likely to motivate people to be more moral (e.g., Amormino et al, 2022), whether moral people value all moral foundations, or whether moral people could pursue different moral values (Fleeson et al, 2023) Social consequences • Those who are perceived as being moral tend to be liked and respected (Goodwin et al, 2014;Hartley et al, 2016;Sun et al, under review) First impressions • People preferentially seek morally relevant information when forming first impressions of others (Brambilla et al, 2011;Goodwin et al, 2014) • First impressions of morality are likely based mostly on observable behavior, and might, therefore, be more related to Moral Reputation than Moral Identity…”