Moral beacons: Understanding moral character and moral influence

Abstract

ObjectiveWe introduce the concept of moral beacons—individuals who are higher in moral character than their peers and prominent within their social environment—and examine the degree to which moral beacons increase the moral awareness of their peers.BackgroundUsing data from cohorts of students in graduate business education across two universities, we applied theory and methods from organizational behavior, personality psychology, and social networks analysis to test two research questions about moral beacons.MethodWe used latent profile analysis of data from personality questionnaires and social network surveys completed by graduate business students at two universities (N = 502) to identify individuals classified as moral beacons. We used peer nominations and an in‐class business case discussion exercise to assess moral influence.ResultsLatent profile analysis identified a latent class of moral beacons in our sample. These individuals received more nominations from their peers in end‐of‐class surveys as guides for moral thought and action and positively impacted the moral awareness of their peers in a discussion of a difficult business case about possible lead poisoning of employees, but did not significantly change their counterparts' moral awareness in a different case.ConclusionsThese results provide promising initial evidence that moral beacons can be distinguished from their peers by both moral character and social prominence and can act as guides for others, at times encouraging greater consideration of the moral aspects of situations and decisions. As these results are the first of their kind, we encourage further replication and investigations of moral beacons and moral influence in other settings.

Why moral psychology needs personality psychology

“…In addition, both self‐ and informant reports of moral pride and hubris contain unique information, and their relative predictive power depends on the outcome. Helzer and colleagues (2024) also show that “moral beacons” who self‐report high levels of morality and who others consider to be socially prominent received more nominations from their peers as being guides for moral thought and action. Finally, Baumert and colleagues (2024) showed that self‐reports of trait moral disengagement predicted fewer everyday acts of moral courage (assessed via experience sampling).…”

“…For example, Bai and colleagues (2024) and Pringle and colleagues (2024) employ informant reports of real‐world social partners' (e.g., friends, romantic partners) moral traits. Fleeson and colleagues (2024) and Helzer and colleagues (2024) use nomination procedures that enable the study of those who are perceived as being moral exemplars in general, or within an MBA classroom. Sun and colleagues (2024) use open‐ended responses to comprehensively describe people's ordinary concepts of moral improvement.…”

“…One such relevant experience might be social influence. For example, Helzer and colleagues (2024) show that moral beacons (those who self‐report high levels of moral traits and are seen as being more socially central by their peers) positively impacted the moral awareness of their peers during a discussion of one difficult business case (but not the other). This provides initial evidence for the idea that socially prominent moral exemplars can serve as moral guides for others.…”

“…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).…”

The Prospects and Challenges of Measuring Morality

“…An alternative to the flexible, subjective approach is to use a fixed set of criteria, which could be derived from philosophical theories, religious prescriptions, cultural values, or a consensus-based commonsense morality. For example, one might operationalize morality as a composite of moral virtues (e.g., compassion, honesty, fairness, and loyalty; ; as a composite of traits such as honesty-humility, guilt-proneness, and moral identity (Cohen et al, 2014;Helzer et al, 2023); as the extent to which a person embodies utilitarian values; or as a composite based on a person's meat-eating, environmental, and charitable donation behaviors. This approach is fixed in the sense that a person's moral temperature is assessed based on the extent to which they align with prespecified criteria-even if that person thinks that such tendencies are morally irrelevant or are even indicative of immorality.…”