By Dan P. McAdams, Northwestern University
In the two conference calls we have had, I was struck by how
discussion regarding the nature and definition of a virtue might connect to
current ideas in psychological science regarding the structure of human
personality. For example, the
distinction between habituation and human free will (from the Power Point
slides for 1/11/11) maps roughly, I think, onto a distinction that has been at
the center of personality psychology for over 100 years – that between
stylistic behavioral traits on the
one hand and human motives on the
other. Can a virtue be but a
habituated trait? Or do we require
an act of will and choice – some kind of motivated decision – in order to make
an attribution of virtue? My
reading of personality psychology suggests that virtue may be perceived from at
least three different standpoints.
I call these the standpoints of actor,
agent, and author. Each reflects
a particular layer of personality
structure.
If we assume that
human beings evolved as social animals striving to get along and get ahead in
group life, then it makes good sense to suggest that personality is first and
foremost about the characteristics of the social
actor. From the first few
weeks of life, human infants engage in social performances, long before they
are even aware of themselves as actors on a social stage. Their performative styles are strongly
driven by inherent temperament tendencies – differences in recurrent mood for
example (e.g., positive affectivity), tendencies toward approach and avoidance
(e.g., behavioral inhibition), and the like. Over the course of many years and repeated gene X
environment interactions, these temperament differences morph into
dispositional traits, such as extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and
so on. Individual differences in
dispositional traits show remarkable longitudinal stability in the adult
years. Dispositional traits form
the most basic layer of personality, characterizing an actor’s recurrent and
recognizable style on the social stage.
Basic traits such as conscientiousness (encompassing tendencies such as
perseverance, discipline, and self-control) and agreeableness (encompassing
tendencies such as altruism, nurturance, and niceness) carry a strong moral
cachet in human groups, suggestive of virtue. A person who is dispositionally high in agreeableness,
therefore, may be seen by others (and by the self) as habitually caring and compassionate. Might we not call this an attribution of virtue? In this case, the “habitual” nature of
the behavior is less about learning a “habit,” research suggests, and more
about actualizing one’s genetic potential, given the high heritability of
dispositional traits. My younger
daughter (age 24) is habitually nice, sincere, and caring – not every minute of
every day, of course, but often, more
often than most other social actors out there. It is no surprise that she has chosen nursing as a
profession. By contrast, my older
daughter (generally low on agreeableness) scores off the map on the high end of
conscientiousness. People admire her virtues of perseverance and hard work. An important point here is that we do
not need a language of choice, will, or motivation to characterize my daughters
– or anybody, for that matter – from the standpoint of the social actor’s
dispositional traits. To the
extent that we see these traits expressing virtue, we may wish to conclude that
habitual social behaviors that carry strong moral cachet, as recurrently
performed by certain social actors across many different social arenas, may be
enough to qualify as the expression of a virtue, even without a language of
moral choice. Call it virtue lite, perhaps. Virtue as habitual social
performance. But if William James
was right when he characterized habit
as “the great fly-wheel of society,” then we should not underemphasize the
importance of those dispositional traits that lead to everyday virtuous
performance.
Human beings are
social actors from the beginning, but eventually they are more, too. In the middle-childhood years, a second
layer of personality begins to form.
Recurrent personal goals
(things I want to achieve today, tomorrow, in my life) begin to layer over
dispositional traits in the elementary-school years, as personality begins to
express itself from the standpoint of the motivated
agent. Human beings may be
goal-directed from birth, but it is not until middle childhood that consistent
individual differences in children may be seen with respect to the goals,
plans, programs, and projects they lay out for themselves – desired ends to
which they orient their will. At
this point, the language of agency – will, choice, decision – becomes a
legitimate part of personality discourse.
Goals layer over traits in personality; goals are distinct from traits,
and cannot be reduced to traits.
Ten-year-old Kristen is a highly outgoing and impulsive girl (social
actor: trait) who has decided that she wants Jesus to come
into her heart, wants Erika to be her
best friend, and hopes that her
estranged mother and father will reconcile (motivated agent: goal). Unlike traits, goals orient the personality toward the
future; they are expressly teleological constructs, and therefore carry
connotations of planning, choice, decision, and so on. Some goals suggest virtue – either in
terms of their content (my New Year’s resolution is to be a more caring
husband) or by the complicated or conflicted calculus that the agent plays out
in his or her mind in an effort to come, say, to a morally defensible
decision. We might say, then, that
as a motivated agent, a person expresses virtue when he or she intends to
achieve a virtuous end, decides, wills, strives, or acts in accord with a plan
to achieve something good. You
don’t need the language of traits to capture this meaning of virtue. The motivated/Layer-2 sense of virtue is
not about habitual social performance.
It is instead about the decisions and choices people make, the goals
they decide to pursue, the motivated plans and programs that shape their future
behavior. Of course, dispositional
traits may influence goals, and goals may, over the long haul, become so
“habitual” in a person’s life that they come to influence traits. Still, traits and goals are distinct
personality constructs, reflecting the conceptual distinction between the
person as a social actor and the person a motivated agent.
In young adulthood, a
third layer of personality begins to form, even as dispositional traits and
characteristic goals and motives continue to develop. In order to meet the demands of what the famous
psychoanalytic theorist Erik Erikson described as ego identity, the young adult must develop a self-affirming and
integrative story for his or her
life. We become autobiographical authors in late
adolescence and young adulthood, as an emerging life story comes to layer over
goals, which layer over traits. As
a person develops a story for his or her life, he or she extends the self back
in time as well as forward, reconstructing the past and imagining the future in
such a way as to confer upon life a sense of unity and purpose. A person’s internalized and evolving
life story –what personality psychologists often call a narrative identity – provides a convincing explanation for who I
was, how I came to be who I am now, and where my life is going in the
future. A life-narrative
perspective on virtue moves us beyond habitual social performance (personality
as actor) and self-chosen virtuous goals (personality as agent) to consider,
perhaps, a virtuous life writ large – a career
in virtue, living out a virtuous narrative
for one’s life. Charles Taylor and
Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, have argued that virtues may be instantiated
in the stories of people’s lives.
What does this mean? It
means more, I think, that doing good things and making good decisions. There is something here about the good
life, in a broad sense. Thinking
about personality from the standpoint of the autobiographical author may
introduce terms and ideas that are worthy of this third especially expansive
and challenging meaning of virtue.
Sources:
McAdams, D. P.
(2006). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by. New York: Oxford University Press.
McAdams, D. P., & Olson, B.
(2010). Personality
development: Continuity and change
over the life course. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 517-542.
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