Research published in the Journal of Personality pursued two fundamental questions: how can one become more moral, and why would one want to become more moral? It turns out that the primary motivation for moral improvement is for one’s own sake.
Previous work has shown that people are more interested in improving their personality traits, particularly those that do not fall along a moral dimension. These might be traits such as anxiety or productivity. However, this finding may stem from constrained research methods.
In this work, Jessie Sun and colleagues set out to understand the way in which people envision their own moral improvements by conducting two large pre-registered studies.
Study 1 included 954 participants who were visitors of the YourMorals.org website, an online platform developed for research on moral psychology. Participants were prompted to describe one thing they want to change about themselves in order to become more morally good. These responses were coded along numerous dimensions, including the breadth of change goals (e.g., a specific or contextualized behavior), amplifying vs. curbing (e.g., increasing a desirable tendency or reducing an undesirable one), trait content categories (e.g., socially desirable or undesirable traits, or other), motivation to make the change, beneficiaries of making the change, costs and benefits for the self or others, as well as the controllability and difficulty of making the change.
Study 2 recruited 864 participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Here, the prompt slightly differed than that of Study 1. Participants were either told to describe one thing they would want to change about themselves/do differently in order to become “more morally good or less morally bad” or “less morally bad or more morally good.” These prompts were counterbalanced between participants. After completing the goal perception questions as in Study 1, participants self-coded their own responses.
Sun and colleagues found that across the two studies that featured different samples and research methods, moral improvements were conceptualized diversely. While many traits were represented, the most common goals among participants were to become more compassionate, less reactive, and more honest (in this particular order).
Participants were also more inclined to frame their moral improvements positively (i.e., starting/increasing a positive trait), as opposed to negatively (i.e., stopping/decreasing a negative trait). Further, participants were less motivated to make improvements relating to the agreeableness personality trait, and more motivated to improve on what they found to be within their control. Interestingly, participants were more motivated to make improvements that would ultimately benefit themselves, and to a lesser extent, others.
The researchers concluded that ordinary people are moved to be moral for their own sake.
A limitation the authors noted is that participants were asked about a moral improvement they were motivated to make, as opposed to one they were already trying to make. Future research ought to target active moral goals, rather than moral aspirations.
The research, “How and why people want to be more moral”, was authored by Jessie Sun, Joshua Wilt, Peter Meindl, Hanne M. Watkins, and Geoffrey P. Goodwin.