Jen Wright

College of Charleston | C of C · Department of Psychology

We appreciate and respond to Cokelet’s thoughtful criticisms of our book. First, he points to deliberative forms of practical wisdom as objectionable to anti-rationalist’s. In response, we point to non-conscious (yet complex) forms of deliberation that occur as individuals automatically process and respond to virtue-relevant stimuli. Second, Cokele...

Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons’ attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism implicitly . Since the studi...

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people ar...

Recent evidence indicates that partisans discriminate against those from the opposing party. However, it is still unclear whether partisan out-group prejudice reveals a desire for out-group harm or in-group help. We investigate the conditions under which these tendencies arise. Using one observational survey and three survey experiments, we show th...

Living together cooperatively in groups requires creating and maintaining healthy socio-cultural normative structures (i.e., shared “normed” beliefs, values, practices, and so on) that allow all members of the group to function well, both as individuals and as a part of the communal whole. This requires maintaining a delicate and dynamic balance be...

The last thirty years has seen a resurgence of interest in virtue among philosophers, psychologists, and educators. As is often the case with interdisciplinary endeavors, this renewed interest in virtue faces an important challenge—namely, successfully standing up to the requirements imposed by different disciplinary standards. For virtue, this mea...

In Chapter 3 we use our working conception of virtue developed in Chapter 1 to anchor an integrated proposal for virtue measurement. More specifically, we argue that what is needed to accurately measure any virtue is a multilayered research program that allows us to track the degree to which a person exhibits each of several aspects of trait manife...

Chapter 2 provides a review and evaluation of work that has been and is currently being done on virtue measurement. It is divided into five parts. The first provides a brief primer on quantitative measurement. The second discusses strategies for measuring discrete, single virtues, namely, gratitude, courage, honesty, compassion, and humility. The t...

Chapter 4 moves beyond providing an account of individual virtues to advance a conception of character. Here “character” means the integration of a constellation of virtues within personality. The chapter presents and defends an “integration” thesis, which means that the distinctiveness of individual characters can be explained by investigating int...

The interdisciplinary science of virtue and character measurement is in its infancy. In this volume, we hope to have moved the conversation forward. We took the first step toward this in Chapter 1 by introducing our working conception of virtue. This is a modified Aristotelianism which we integrated with Whole Trait Theory (WTT). The point of doing...

Chapter 5 offers strategies for the measurement of character as a whole, not just of specific virtues. Specifically, it discusses measuring virtue constellations to describe the co-manifestation of multiple virtues that (in part) constitute a person’s character; the measurement of the regulative function of practical wisdom (or phronēsis ) as one w...

Chapter 1, “Our Working Model of Virtue,” presents the conception of virtue that informs the authors’ thinking throughout the volume. This is a modified Aristotelianism, which the authors seek to integrate with Whole Trait Theory (WTT), an empirical account of traits recently developed by Will Fleeson and Eranda Jayawickreme. The authors argue that...

According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers' semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgement...

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory (WTT) from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personalit...

Our chapter is motivated by an underlying assumption that layperson’s intuitions, beliefs, and judgments about moral and legal issues and public policy—which we refer to as “folk jurisprudence”—is relevant to philosophical and legal theorizing about the normative status of the use of neurological interventions. While we are quick to acknowledge tha...

One of the main arguments that has been given for the importance of virtue is that it is not only important for, but is in fact constitutive of, a life well-lived, necessary for human wellbeing and flourishing. Yet, human life is also profoundly fragile, often filled with, and always vulnerable to, suffering. Thus, we must ask: what role does virtu...

After the Second World War, the interest of both psychologists and philosophers in topics such as suffering, the virtues, and the meaning of life has only grown. Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, born in the concentration camps and developed in the following decades, presented itself as a promising and wide-ranging vein of research after the traumatic s...

Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument’s empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking...

Through a novel survey instrument, we examined traits and characteristics that various scholars and observers have averred promote or hinder proenvironmental behaviors. We found that those who hold anthropocentric and monotheistic religious views, and express low levels of environmental, religious, and cosmic humility, are less likely to engage in...

We each stand, phenomenologically speaking, at the center of the universe. This inherent centeredness biases our experience of our own needs, desires, interests, beliefs, goals, and values as being more immediate and urgent than those of others’, manifesting in a natural self-orientation that—if left unchecked—can lead us to problematically privile...

Lay persons may have intuitions about morality’s objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical...

The Character Gap by Christian Miller is an excellent discussion of how the empirical research conducted on virtue bears upon the larger question of whether or not people are virtuous, especially when we consider the question through the lens of a philosophically rigorous account of virtue. His conclusion is that overall people are not virtuous—but...

This chapter has two objectives. The first is to argue for the fact of meta-ethical pluralism. In other words, the chapter argues that the recent empirical scholarship suggesting that people are both realists and anti-realists cannot be simply dismissed on the basis of being philosophically inadequate because even when we increase the level of clar...

In Chapter 15, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Jennifer Cole Wright investigate the relationship between free will beliefs (or the lack thereof) and existential anxiety. In an attempt to shed light on this relationship, they set out to test whether trait humility can serve as a “buffer” between the two-that is, are people who are high in dispositional humil...

What does it mean to be humble? We argue that humility is an epistemically and ethically aligned state of awareness – the experience of ourselves as a small part of a larger universe and as one among a host of other morally relevant beings. So conceived, humility can be operationalized and measured along the dual dimensions of low self-focus and hi...

This study investigates the use of imaginative role-play games to sponsor positive development in young adult moral reasoning. Twelve college students participated in six approximately 4-hour gaming sessions using a customized game system based on Dungeons & Dragons™ (D&D, 1974, 4th ed.). The games contained embedded social/moral dilemmas (e.g., wh...

As John Rawls makes clear in A Theory of Justice, there is a popular and influential strand of political thought for which brute luck – that is, being lucky (or unlucky) in the so-called “lottery of life” – ought to have no place in a theory of distributive justice. Yet the debate about luck, desert, and fairness in contemporary political philosoph...

In this paper we first set the stage with a brief overview of the tangled history of humility in theology and philosophy—beginning with its treatment in the Bible and ending with the more recent work that has been done in contemporary philosophy (§§1–2). Our two-fold goal at this early stage of the paper is to explore some of the different accounts...

One important socio-cultural medium through which young children’s moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children’s use of basic (‘thin’) evaluative concepts (good, bad, right and wrong), which are ubiquitous in everyday discourse and serve as a potential bridge from the non-moral to the...

A growing body of empirical research suggests that people's concrete-case intuitions are unstable—i.e., vulnerable to biasing influences—with no way of anticipating the instability. This has led some to challenge the use of intuitions in philosophical practice. In this chapter, I consider responses to this challenge. One is that the empirical resea...

Humility is a virtue with a rich and varied past. Its benefits and pitfalls – indeed, its status as a virtue – have been debated by philosophers and theologians. Recently, psychologists have entered into the dialectic, with a small but growing body of empirical research at their disposal. We will discuss this research on humility, including our own...

The issue of successfully reintegrating ex-prisoners into society is a critical one. To assess the process of successful reintegration, we interviewed five male ex-convicts about their past versus present lives. Their responses were coded for self-oriented (agency) and community-oriented values. We found a shift away from “unmitigated” agency, towa...

Meta-ethical pluralism gives us additional insight into how moral communities become cohesive and why this can be problematic (even dangerous) – and in this way provides support for the worries raised by the target article. At the same time, it offers several reasons to be concerned about the proposed initiative, the most important of which is that...

Social psychologists have found that stereotypes correlate with moral judgments about agents and actions. The most commonly studied stereotypes are race/ethnicity and gender. But atheists compose another stereotype, one with its own ignominious history in the Western world, and yet, one about which very little is known. This project endeavored to f...

Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology brings together leading scholars in the field to provide fresh theoretical perspectives on research in philosophy and psychology. Reflecting a diverse and active field of study, contributors are drawn from across both subjects to pursue central questions concerning moral psychology. Covering a wide-ranging...

Previous research has identified different moral judgments in liberals and conservatives. While both care about harm/fairness (‘individualizing’ foundations), conservatives emphasize in-group/authority/purity (‘binding’ foundations) more than liberals. Thus, some argue that conservatives have a more complex morality. We suggest an alternative view—...

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry fueled by the empirical discovery of irrational bias (e.g., the order effect) in people's judgments has recently been challenged by research suggesting that people can introspectively track intuitional instability. The two studies reported here build upon thi...

Moral conviction predicts interpersonal tolerance in adults, but its role in children and adolescents is not as well understood. This study measured moral conviction for a variety of issues along two separate dimensions - cognitive and affective - in children and adolescents (4th-12th grade). Results showed that, like adults, when children and adol...

Two measures of moral cognition were compared across three samples: Rest’s neo-Kohlbergian stages of moral developmental (DIT) and Graham and Haidt’s intuition-based Moral Foundations Theory (MFQ). In spite of differences both in theory and in measurement, there was considerable overlap between Stage 2/3 “personal interests” (DIT) and In-group (MFQ...

Recent scholarship (Goodwin & Darley, 2008) on the meta-ethical debate between objectivism and relativism has found people to be mixed: they are objectivists about some issues, but relativists about others. The studies discussed here sought to explore this further. Study 1 explored whether giving people the ability to identify moral issues for them...

Recent research provides evidence that one important difference between liberals and conservatives is their basic moral intuitions. These studies suggest that while liberals and conservatives respond similarly to considerations of harm/care and fairness (what Graham and Haidt call the “individualizing” foundations), conservatives also respond stron...

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered i...

Young children's persuasion tactics, and how these reflected attunement to others' mental states, were explored in archived longitudinal samples of transcribed at-home conversations of four children, three to five years old. Over 87,000 utterances were examined to identify conversation ‘chunks’ involving persuasion; 1,307 chunks were then coded for...

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry has recently been bolstered by empirical research suggesting that people's concrete-case intuitions are vulnerable to irrational biases (e.g., the order effect). What is more, skeptics argue that we have no way to "calibrate" our intuitions against these bias...

It has been claimed that the attempt to analyze know-how in terms of propositional knowledge over-intellectualizes the mind. Exploiting the methods of so-called “experimental philosophy”, we show that the charge of over-intellectualization is baseless. Contra neo-Ryleans, who analyze know-how in terms of ability, the concrete-case judgments of ordi...

Recent experimental research on the ‘Knobe effect’ suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that there is a bi-directional relation between attributions of intentional action and evaluative considerations. We defend a novel account of this phenomenon that exploits two factors: (i) an intuitive asymmetry in judgments of responsibility (e.g. praise/blame) an...

The present studies investigate the role of both cognitive and affective dimensions of moral conviction in contributing to negative interpersonal responses. After demonstrating that the cognitive and affective dimensions of moral conviction are distinct constructs, the studies show that the cognitive dimension is sufficient to produce many forms of...

Two children's conversations with adults were examined for reference to moral issues using transcripts of archived at-home family talk from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database (MacWhinney, 2000). Through target words (e.g., good, wrong, mean) in transcripts of two children between ages 2.5 and 5.0 years, 1,333 moral conversat...

sunstein's characterization of moral blunders jointly indicts an intuitive process and the structure of heuristics. but intuitions need not lead to error, and the problems with moral heuristics apply also to moral principles. accordingly, moral development may well involve more, rather than less, intuitive responsiveness. this suggests a novel traj...