President-Elect's Column: Is Morality the Dark Matter of Personality Psychology?
William Fleeson
Morality makes the news when even a single psychologist violates it, it is part of the bedrock assumptions of the conduct of our field, it is part of the daily discourse of research, it is the primary cause for each of us entering the field, and it is nearly invisible and undetectable in our journals.
A psychologist’s recent admission of falsifying data, as well as other recent startling moral transgressions, have given the field an opportunity to reflect on its methods and procedures. Even the New York Times claimed that the field “badly needs to overhaul how it treats research results”. Single cases of scientific misconduct demand so much attention because morality is such a deep and central value to the conduct of science.
In fact, it is perhaps the first principle assumption that all scientists make and share: the first assumption of science may be that we report data honestly. Morality is the starting point for science.
Morality arises in most personality psychologists’ professional lives on a daily basis. Design of studies, ethical treatment of participants, careful analysis of data, honest reporting of results, review of journal articles, impact of findings on individuals, hiring and promotion, and a host of other daily topics mean that psychologists wrestle with ethical dilemmas every day.
Morality and ethics may be the central motivation for personality psychologists entering the field. Sure, many of us like the lifestyle or inherently enjoy the activities in science, but I would be surprised to find a psychologist who didn’t include improving the world, helping people, advancing truth, or teaching people among their motivations. Most psychologists would pick one of these moral concerns as their primary motivation.
In fact, research may exist in a historically very short golden age. In no other society in history has so much attention been devoted to improving the human condition. When Bob Zajonc wrote about his motivation to become a psychologist, he quoted the UNESCO motto "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”
Yet, morality is nearly invisible to our field (with some notable exceptions). There are many good reasons for this:
- Morality seems like a restrictive, preachy, and well, moralistic topic.
- Science must vigilantly guard against value-induced bias.
- Morality appears unscientific, because it appears mystical, spooky, and subjective.
- Personality psychologists have a special duty to avoid judging people and arousing defensive reactions.
- Morality is a normative concern, and normative concerns cannot be studied with scientific methods.
Fortunately, social and developmental psychologists have overcome these objections recently. This means that psychological knowledge about morality is coming only from social and developmental psychology. This is a vast improvement. But we have to acknowledge that the short-term experimental method of social psychology tends to uncover negative morality—situations or other forces that lead to individuals making immoral, selfish, or other poor choices. As a result, the emerging scientific picture is that humans are billiard balls being knocked around by insignificant and transient situational forces and committing moral sin after moral sin.
Personality psychology is particularly suited for the study of morality. If people are capable of making positive moral decisions and enacting positive moral behaviors, and if people base moral decisions on more than the immediate situation, then long-standing variables—the type that personality psychologists study—are required in the study of morality. Thus, personality psychology is positioned to contribute the positive picture of morality. Personality psychology is positioned to explain the processes by which long-standing personality variables interact with and overcome immediate pressures and lead to moral choices that reveal the underlying person. And, I bet, if psychology is ever going to contribute to the construction of the defenses of peace in people’s minds, it is going to need to know these processes.
Morality has been an especially dark matter of personality psychology for longer and in greater depth than for any other field. Many personality psychologists today would not even be aware that “character” was an early and strong competitor to “personality” as the actual name of the field. It was only just over 100 years ago that the study of personality was inherently considered to be the study of good, virtuous, and moral personality, that is, of character, rather than of neutral personality. In fact, the person-situation debate really got going in the 1920’s with Hartshorne & May’s study of the consistency of character, not of personality, and is still raging with regard to character, even in philosophy.
Morality is ubiquitous; morality is important to every day of our professional and personal lives; morality is the source of our careers; and morality contains our most cherished and personal values. It seems like we could study it.