Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology

Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, by Darcia Narvaez & Daniel K. Lapsley (Eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 464 pages (ISBN 978-0-521-89507-1, CA $106.95 Hardcover; ISBN 978-0-521-71927-8, CA $40.95 Paperback)

Reviewed by CLTVE SELIGMAN

DOI: 10.1037/a0025486

According to the editors, moral psychology has frequently been studied separately in diverse disciplines with varied methodologies and theoretical perspectives, often without an appropriate understanding of related approaches, for example, grounding personality and morality in developmental processes. The goal of the book is to begin to build an integrative approach to problems of morality. The thematic focus of the book is the examination of morality within the context of personality, identity, and character. The editors wisely do not call for a grand theory of morality, but instead recognise that readers who have thought about morality within the confines of their own approaches would benefit from the opportunity to learn how those with other disciplinary or subdisciplinary perspectives deal with their facets of the problem. To accomplish this end, the editors have recruited scholars from several fields: philosophy, neuroscience, personality, developmental psychology, and social psychology, most of whom do a good job of trying to link their work to the stated thematic focus. The book is based on the 2006 Notre Dame Symposium on Personality and Moral Character, with additional chapters being contributed by scholars who spoke at a second Notre Dame Symposium in 2008.

The book consists of an introduction and 19 chapters. The editors' introductory chapter provides an excellent overview of the main points or arguments in each of the chapters. Their own concluding chapter is a very thoughtful summary of the themes, unanswered questions, and future directions. The chapters are well written and many are even fun to read. Morality is an intrinsically interesting topic, and there are insights aplenty in each chapter, both about morality and about the subfields in which they are discussed. The book, or certainly large chunks of it, would be suitable for use in graduate courses, and even in undergraduate, senior special topic courses. The worst thing I can say about the book is that the subject index is thin and thus not very useful.

Space limitations prevent my commenting on each of the chapters, but let me try to convey a flavour of the book through several observations. The two chapters on personality review different conceptions of personality and personality-behaviour interactions. McAdams explains that personality consists of several levels: traits, characteristic adaptations, and life narratives and that each level has something to say about morality, perhaps life narratives more so than the others. Cervone and Tripathi point out that personality is a reasonable predictor of behaviour if we also know how the individual construes the situation in which the personality trait is expected to be expressed. And it is perhaps even more complicated than this when we consider that not all moral behaviour reaches high consensus about its morality. For example, giving money to charities or donating blood would likely be considered a good thing by virtually all people. However, many social issues do not have the luxury of consensus. Is abortion good or bad? Does Dr. Henry Morgenthaler have a low or a high moral character? What are the implications for moral education of not being able to specify what is moral? The editors ask, "How do we live well the life that is good for one to Uve?" Regretfully the book cannot answer this question. But it does go far in instructing us on how individuals and even societies find these answers for themselves.

Moll and colleagues discuss brain mechanisms with regard to the morality of choices made in the trolley car dilemma. In the trolley car problem, research participants are asked to choose whether they would sacrifice one life to save five from being killed by the trolley. In one version the individual can save the others by pulling a switch to direct the trolley to a different track that would only kill one person; in another version the individual would have to throw a fat person onto the track to stop the trolley. It turns out that many more participants will pull the switch to save the others than throw someone onto the track to reach the same goal. fMRI studies revealed that the "cognitive" parts of the brain were mostly activated for the first version of the dilemma, whereas the "emotional" parts of the brain were activated by the second version. Moll et al. argue that it is likely wrong to think that we can easily, if at all, separate emotional and cognitive functions when assessing responses to moral dilemmas such as the trolley car problem. In their view, ". . .all morally relevant experiences are considered to be essentially cognitive-emotional association complexes."

Monin and Jordan persuasively show that situational conditions can affect moral judgments. They discuss several interesting variations on this theme. A moral credential is earned when one acts morally. Interestingly, having acted morally at Time 1 , individuals may now feel licensed to act less morally at Time 2, as if there is a moral balance principle at work. Moral resentment refers to the phenomenon whereby someone who acted morally in a situation may be resented by others in the same situation who didn't acquit themselves as well morally. Moral compensation occurs when one's self-esteem is threatened by another's actions and the individual compensates by boosting his own moral self-regard and lowering his view of the other's morality. In a related vein, Skitka and Morgan discuss the double-edged sword of moral concern. They show that people with strong moral stances on particular issues can also be intolerant of those who have different positions, have difficulty resolving conflicts about these issues, and may disobey laws if they counter their own views on the issues (but see also Schlenker et al. 's chapter on the value of moral principles).

There are so many interesting phenomena discussed in the book that it may be cranky to quibble about some that are left out. Although values are touched on in several chapters, they never get the full treatment that they deserve. Milton Rokeach is almost completely ignored, even though his theory of values very much involved the core self, often in a morally relevant way. Additionally, again though not entirely absent, a discussion of what to make of the personality development of people who frequently act antisocially would be welcome. In this regard, recent research on the differences between prescriptive norms to be good and prescriptive norms not to harm may be useful to follow up, as the emerging research shows they are not simply opposites.

[Sidebar]

Darcia Narvaez, PhD, is Associate Professor in Psychology, specializing in moral development and character education, at the University of Notre Dame and directs the university's Collaborative for Ethical Education.

Daniel K. Lapsley, PhD, is the ACE Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame.

[Author Affiliation]

Clive Seligman is Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Recently he served on the Expert Panel of the Council of Canadian Academies, Honesty, Accountability, and Trust: Fostering Research Integrity in Canada. His research interests include values, evil, and political ideologies.