3 Features of the Personalities of Moral People

We trust and respect the people we see as having strong moral character. Can psychology shed light on the personality features common to such people? A recent study in the Journal of Personality seeks to better understand the personalities of highly moral people.

Moral Character

One of the first tasks facing the authors of the study was to define in a measurable way what it means to be a moral person. The researchers opted to focus on a concept they call "shared moral character." This is a combination of a person's self-assessment of their moral character and the assessments made by other people who know them.

• The self-assessment portion of shared moral character captures an individual's moral identity. This has to do with aspects of a person's moral life that are not necessarily observed by others. It includes the person's internal states and acts that they do in private.
• The assessments made by other people who know them capture the individual's moral reputation. This addresses aspects of a person's moral life that are visible to others.

As the study authors point out, moral identity and moral reputation do not necessarily align since we may evaluate our moral character differently than others evaluate us.

To measure moral character, researchers focused on a set of five widely accepted moral traits. Participants were asked to say to what extent they were:

• fair
• honest
• loyal
• trustworthy
• kind

The assessment of moral reputation, in turn, involved asking people who knew a given participant to what extent the individual possessed each of these traits.

Linking Moral Character and Personality

Researchers assessed participants' personalities by drawing on the Five-Factor (or "Big 5") and HEXACO trait-based personality models. They discovered three important connections.

Five-Factor Model

The researchers found that people higher in shared moral character tended to score higher on two factors from the Five-Factor Model.

• Agreeableness: This factor has to do with the way people interact with others. Higher agreeableness indicates a tendency to be warm and cooperative. Lower agreeableness indicates a tendency to be critical, unsympathetic, and motivated more by personal gain.
• Conscientiousness: This factor has to do with being industrious and orderly, efficient in getting things done, finishing what you start, and paying attention to details.

HEXACO Model

People higher in shared moral character tended to score higher on one factor from the HEXACO personality model, the honesty-humility factor.

• Honesty-Humility: Those with a high degree of honesty-humility tend to be seen as trustworthy, fair, and altruistic. They are less likely to behave in manipulative ways or to pursue personal gain at another's expense.

Morality and Personality

The study is valuable insofar as it contributes to our understanding of links among common moral traits and personality. But there are limitations of the research, which the researchers acknowledge.

For example, it could be argued that what is being measured in the study does not capture what is most important about moral life. At least, it will seem this way from the point of view of Kantian or deontological ethics. Kantian ethics asks the question of whether a person is truly motivated by moral aims. If the real reason someone donates to charity is to improve their reputation, they are not doing it for a moral reason so the act isn't deemed to have moral worth.

It isn't obvious that asking people to self-report on their possession of certain moral traits—or asking people who know them to do so—will be enough to reveal the real reasons for their actions. Such self-reports are not guaranteed to offer a glimpse into the hidden depths of their moral reasoning.

Perhaps the best way to look at this limitation is to see it as mirroring the wider gap that is bound to exist between the field of personality psychology, which requires readily measurable concepts, and the much more abstract field of moral philosophy.