Christian Miller || How Good Are We, Really?

It's great to have Christian Miller on the podcast. Doctor Miller is ac Read Professor of Philosophy at wake Forest University and director of the Character Project, funded by the John Tempton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over seventy five papers, as well as the author of Moral Character and Empirical Theory, Character and Moral Psychology, and most recently, the book The Character Gap. How good are we? Hey, Christian, thanks so much for

chatting with me today. Thanks so much for having me on your show. So how good are we really? Well, that's a big question to start us off right away? Yeah, all right, let's not mess around. So one question is what is good mean here? And what are our standards that we're going to be used to evaluate whether someone is good or not. Another question is who the we is? And then another question still is what source of evidence am I going to be using to decide how good

are we? But let me I'll say something briefly on each of those. So the good I have in mind here when we say how good are we? Is virtuous. So I'm a philosopher who works in the area of ethics, and within area of ethics, there's a long standing tradition to think about good people and bad people in terms of the kind of character they have and whether they're

virtuous people or vicious people. And so I could say a lot more about what I mean by a virtue or advice, but just to put that on the table, when I say how good are we, I'm thinking about how virtuous are we? We have in mind here tends to be contemporary people. So I'm not saying throughout history tends to be Westerners, because the source of evidence I'm drawing on tends to focus on just Western populations, and

it tends to be adults as opposed to children. And then the last part of it is what's the source of evidence that I'm going to be using that's where you come in. So that's where psychology helps me out. Looking at studies that have been done in social and personality psychology over the last fifty years or so, roughly speaking, which put people into different situations, morally relevant situations. I'm looking at moral character here and see how they tend

to behave Do they cheat or not cheat? Do they lie or not lie? Do they steal or not steal? Do they help or not help? And so I know we can dive into the particular studies. But to tie all that together then, using the research that I'm familiar with in psychology, which tends to focus on contemporary Western populations, and using the ethical standards of virtue and vice, my conclusion now, to not evade the question anymore, is that

most of us are a mixed bag. By that, I mean we have some aspects of our character which are morally positive and some aspects of our character which are morally negative. But in general, most people, I'm not saying everyone they're outliers. This is a kind of a Bell Care kind of situation. Most people, given my reading of the data, have a character which is not good enough to count as virtuous. But on the flip side is not bad enough to count as vicious, so we're somewhere

in a murky middle between the two. Yeah, that's so interesting. I recently did this paper. We looked at the light very dark triad of personality. We created a light triad scale to be a nice counterpart to the dark triad scale, which consists of psychopathy, Machabeliism, and narcissism. And we found, consistent with what you're saying, we looked at a light versus dark triad balance within individuals. Okay, calculate, what are most people like? They're light and dark force? What is

it in the average human? And we actually empirically try to answer that question, and we found that most people are like slightly tipped to the right of lightness. But it's like basically empirically confirms exactly what you just said. Okay, okay, great. Was that more with self report measures? That was based on self report measures, but we also correlated the light triad with performance measures of conspicuous consumption and cheating and

stuff like greed. Greed. Yeah, I look forward to the paper and all the support I can guess, you know, how welcome. It's great. So what we have lots to talk about because you initiate this project called the Character Project, I'd like to hear some of the main findings, that mean, takeaways from the Character project and who were the sample right? So they were in this sample right. So this is quite a large project that had many different facets to it. So let me kind of paid a picture and then

we can go in different directions if you like. This was a five year project based at wake Forest University where I am funded by the Tempton Foundation, as you mentioned, and it had a component of research at wake Forest, and then it had another component which was funding research

at other universities around the world. So we actually became a kind of mini grants making institute ourselves, where we had researchers in psychology, philosophy, and theology apply with proposals for new and innovative work on the topic of character. They applied to us, We had their proposals reviewed and funded the best ones we received, so we ended up funding twenty eight scholars around the world very interesting products

and psychology especially. But then also there was the aspect of what we did here at wake Forest, and by we, I mean myself. I was the one heading it. Up in the philosophy department, but with a team of other people, including some prominent personality psychologists like William Fleeson, Mike Ferr and the rat At Jairokim in our psychology department here.

So the psychologist here did a number of empirical studies, and in my own case, I was doing what I wanted to explored a little bit already with you, that kind indisciplinary work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. So where philosophy was going to be informing me as to what the good life is and what it is to be a virtuous person, and then the psychological research was going to be informing me as to the extent to which people tend to live up to those standards

of what it is to be a good person. And so in my own case that ended up resulting in the two academic books that you mentioned, the inn Introduction Character in Moral Psychology and Moral Character and Empirical Theory. So the overall takeaway, I think, and we can get into the specific finding some different projects, the overall takeaways that we we really wanted to infuse a lot of excitements and energy and resources into the study of character

in these three disciplines. We thought, you know, there's some work going on already, but not much, and we wanted to kind of incentivize and get people paying it more attention to it. Now that the product is over and we've been it's been over for a couple of years now, we've seen lots more work coming out in the in the area of character and that's one of the great rewards that I'm most proud of. That is great. You gave really great context behind the study. Did you tell

me some of the key takeaways of the study? Did I miss that? So it's hard to say that there's any one study. Okay, So you know I could. We had my books, We had the psychology research away for us, We had the products that were funded elsewhere. I'll mention, how diould I just give you a couple of highlights, Yes, the highlight reel. So one psychology product we funded was at the University of Barcelona by David Galarda, and he

was doing a virtual reality simulation of the Molgrim experiments. So, since you can't do Mlgrim anymore these days, for you know, ethical reasons, he had this committivative thought of using this virtual reality lab that he has there to simulate in many ways the real study, but without a person quote unquote getting the shocks instead of virtual reality avatar who was getting the shocks in the in the shops. Is that ecologically valid? Well, that's a good good question to

ask keV. He made the case that it was, and that was you know, at the time, this was six seven years ago. I was convinced by his arguments, and the findings tended to mirror for whatever this is worth, tend to mirror those that Milgrim found himself. So roughly the same percentage of participants would go up to the xxx shock level as compared to those who wouldn't go that high. So that's one illustration of the kind of

product we've studied in psychology. Another one was looking at from a developmental perspective at when is there evidence fairness norms emerging in young infants? You know, at what stage is it can we kind of detect that they pay attention to fairness norms And this researcher suggested it could be as early as nine months based on her behavioral work. A third researcher, Sarah Conrath, was looking at ways to

encourage empathy. She was using a text message a manipulation or I'm sorry intervention to see whether by receiving text messages periodically during the day which had empathetic themes to them, that might be effective in cultivating empathy in the participants and then subsequent leading them to behave better on a helping task than a control group which did not receive empathy inducing texts, as she found some preliminary evidence that

was the case. So that's why I struggled when I said, when you said, what's the results of the study, you are three very different studies with you know, very different goals in minds, but all under the broadheading of investigating character from them here empirical perspective. Yeah, no, I totally hear you. So is our website where people can read up about the summaries of all the findings. Yeah, that's great. So we have a website www. The Character Project all

one word dot com, and we have summaries. We also have videos have speaking at a conference the participants and summarizing their results, and we have linked to the published works as well. So it seems like you're defining character as tinged with morality, whereas a lot of people in the field of posit psychology, you know, who use the via personality strengths inventory. A lot of those character strengths

are not necessarily tinged with morality. In fact, you could have a character strength for let's say authenticity and be authentic in being an asshole. Right, So why do you choose to define character in the way you have chosen it? Do you have criticism on how others have chosen than to define it? Yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great, great question. So let me be a little clearer, and I think,

actually I'm going to agree with your points. So one broad category here could be personality traits, with under the heading of personality traits you might say that one species is character traits. And then under the heading up character traits, you might say there's one species are moral character traits morally relevant character traits. So I do agree that character traits are broader than just the morally relevant ones. Some

people try to classify them and divide them into different kinds. So, for example, some people say that there are epistemic character traits, those character traits that have to do with theoretical inquiry, theoretical knowledge and wisdom and understanding and the like. Others will say that there are character traits associated with aesthetics and beauty, others character traits associated with athletics. And then they are the moral ones too, So I don't mean

to conflate character traits. It's just with the moral ones. I think that's quite right to say that they're a kind of character trait. For me, I just chose on my own research to focus on the morally ones, morally relevant ones. I had to start somewhere. I'm an ethics professor, That's what I do, so you know, it seems natural to start with those. So when I say things like most people's characters is neither virtuos or vicious. What I

mean here is moral character. I'm speaking to that specifically, and I think that's a pretty common approach to take. I think so as well, Yeah, let's talk philosophically about definitions here. In boundary conditions, can we precisely delineate where something is fits within the realm of a character trait personality trait versus a non character personality trait? So are the Big five? They're not usually treated as character traits. Well, philosophically,

why not? Can you justify or explain to me why extroversion introversion dimension of personality is not a character dimension. But let's say bravery non bravery is, and doesn't it get murky when you start to like really think about it and I realize that bravery is strongly correlated with extra versions. So in a sense, you are saying that you know, Okay, do you see I'm saying it? I surely do so. I don't know if I can give

you what you wants, but here are some fossomies. One thought is that when people say that, you know, the Big Five are not dealing with character, what they typically means moral character here. So they're saying that there are Big Five traits and they're fastest. And then they'll say there's more character traits. And then they'll say, well, we

don't see much more character in the Big five. Maybe under agreeable to us, we might say there's modesty and maybe there's some helping going on, but by and March, it doesn't seem to be much more character in the Big Five. Or it's face it's on a surface reading, and that's I think a fair point to make. But there's a deeper question that you're asking here, which is, can we could give a precise criteria to distinguish, say, moral character on the one side, from non moral personality

on the other. I don't know if we can, but I'll at least mention one or two attempts. So one attempt is to focus on the topic of responsibility. I had to say that our character traits are those for which it's appropriate to hold someone morally responsible or not, Whereas when we think about other personality traits moral character traits, we wouldn't necessarily have to hold someone responsible for possessing them.

So to take your example, someone's level of extraversion or introversion, it wouldn't seem to be appropriate to hold someone more responsible for that, But someone's level of honesty or compassion, or maybe even the temperance, it would be appropriate to hold someone responsible for those traits. So I'm not saying this is a perfect proposal, but I'm saying it's one that's out there that's been proposed to draw this kind of criteria. I'm trying to, Okay, I'm trying to like

run my head around that. So it gets tricky when you like with the VIA twenty four character strengths, some of them are treated as independent of each other. And what gets tricky about that is if you're extroverted, you're probably going to be more likely to, like, I'm really trying to think that the relationship between personality and character strengths. So if you're more extroverted, you're going to be like, much more likely to report zest as one of your

character strengths. If you're more introverted, you're going to be more likely to select humility. If we found this in our own research we did with Susan Kane and some other particular subset of character strengths. So yet when we look at the Big Five, you know, we'll say, like, oh, there's a distinction here between personality and character. You know,

like the introverse and extraversion dimension is amoral. But we actually have on the VIA, we have different sources of very a that can kind of actually conflict, and I don't know if that's problematic at all. So you're thinking that in the case of the VIA, what's looked like perhaps some non moral traits do tend to be strongly correlated with some relatively uncontroversial moral traits, and so it's

hard to draw any sharp boundaries in a classification. I don't know what I'm really saying, because I love the VIA in the sense that I found it really useful for a lot of people to take it and find their top strengths. You know, so much of life and self actualization, in my view, is helping people find how they want to live their own best life in their own way without giving them, you know, their own sort of like you know rules, and they have to kind

of discover that and discover it for themselves. And that the VIA is a nice way to help people discover some sides in themselves. But it's a you know, maybe it's just too and being too pedantic and trying to think through, well, what is a absolutely non character personality trait, you know, and like why is zest a character trait when it's essentially big five extraversion or one facet of extraversion.

I mean it is zest is almost perfect correlated with positive enthusiasm, which is one of the two mean enough aspects of extraversion. Yeah, so I wonder this is maybe just getting semantic at this point. It might be, and I might be way too being way too bedanced, even more so than a philosopher. So I mean, it was called the character strengths, the twenty four character strengths. I wonder how much is packed into the notion of character

there in character strengths. I mean, another way to think about this that might be helpful is, you know, if we're thinking about is something a part of moral character and not? Can we kind of draw boundaries around the realm of moral character? Well, take a given trait and vary it, strengthen it or weakness. Does that change our moral assessment of the person or not? For something like zess, I would think that initially the answer would be no.

I mean, increase someone's astor you decrease someone's ess. That's not going to change how I would morally assess or appraise the person. Would you take somebody like honesty and increase someone's honesty or decrease someone's honesty, That does change my overall assessment of the morality of that person's character. So that might be another way to helpfully think about drawing trying to draw the boundaries of moral character. Yeah,

so I hear what you're saying. Within the character strengths space, there's a subset that are related to moral character. Yeah, that's all You're really saying yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I'm going to move on from my pedanticism and ask you, you know you looked at what our character looks like today in various dimensions helping, harming, lying, and cheating. Can we talk about them? Can we quite start with helping? You know, where are people at these days?

And in terms of helping? Sure? So figure that out from the armchair, And my philosopher, I like to do things from the armchair. Would be great if I could arrive at all these answers without having to get way into the empirical lature. But for something like that, I

need the empirical lature. So I would look at, on the one hand, studies which found that people didn't help very much, and I would then, on the other had look at studies which kound of people helps quite a bit, and I would kind of examine what factors would predict whether the participants would tend to help or not. So my ultimate goal there is to think are people helping? Is people's helping tracking the morally relevant considerations or not?

Are people helping in light of the the correct moral considerations? And are they not helping in light of the correct moral considerations or not. That's the abstract answer. Now to get into some of the specifics, So I'll give you two studies on opposite ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, we have something like group effect studies where you know, to take one of the classic examples, lady in the stress, sixty nine participants come into the lab. One of the time, they go into room they told

the toll out the survey. A stranger joins him in the room filling out the survey. So the two of them are hard at work. The person in charge, he gave them the survey, leaves, goes into the next room. A few minutes later, there's a loud crash and the screams of pain and crying and say my leg, my leg out out ouch, and you know what happens. Subsequently, the question is did the participants do anything to help, you know, cry out, can I get someone to help

you or run into the next room or not. And it seemed like if it was a it seems to me like if it was a compassionate person, highly burcherous person, they would tend to help, and they're helping wouldn't vary as a function of what the stranger with them did but lo and behold it. For actual participants it did vary considerably. So if the stranger with them does nothing, this keeps working on the survey as if there's no emergency at all. By large, this is no new news

is very famous research. By large, the participants won't help either. So in that particular study, only seven percent of participants did anything at all to help, as compared to another version where they were alone with no stranger at all, and in that version seventy percent helps. So it seemed like their behavior was quite sensitive to what another person in the room was doing. And in particular, the underlying story has to do with factors of embarrassment fear of embarrassment,

and that's the most important moral considerations. So that seems to me to reflect somewhat badly on character. I wouldn't draw grandiose lessons from that. One study doesn't prove anything here. I'm just giving you a kind of an illustration of one of the more depressing or disappointing results that I

came across on the flip side with helping. I'm really impressed with the work of Daniel Batson, who was like asas for most of his career and is one of the lead leading researchers on the topic of empathy and helping. It's long been known that when you increase participants empathy, they subsequently are much more likely to help this empathy helping relationship. That's no big discovery, but that's in you know.

One of his claims to fame in the research world is to try and come up with an explanatory hypothesis for why empathy tends to lead to higher levels of helping behavior. And his proposal, and the empathy altruism hypothesis, proposes that the motivation that's induced by feeling empathy is genuinely altruistic. Motivation is motivation concerned with benefiting others for their own sake, independent of whether I, the actor benefit

or not. So in one of his studies, he had the these are college students, they had an opportunity to help of what they were told was a fellow member of their university they never come across, and who had been in a terrible car wreck and in need of a tremendous amount of health in order to be able to graduate from the university. And it's cut through the details just to get to the punchline control subjects by

and large did not sign up to help. Those who would be given a different two sentence manipulation in the instructions, by and large did sign up to help this Katie Banks, this fellow allegedly fellow student at the university, and then at Bason's right. Not only are they acting more helpfully because of the empathy manipulation, but their motivation to help is altruistic. That's the kind of motivation I would expect of a virtuous person, of a compassionate person in particular,

So to summarize and then stop. When I looked at this licture and helping, I saw two kind of suck sides of it. I have more discouraging side where there's evidence of lack of helping, not for very good reasons, and a more positive side whereas evidence of helping and some cases when it's empathetic helping for quite good reasons. And so no surprise than at that point I drew the conclusion that were a rather mixed bag in between the polls of virtue, advice or in this case, compassion

and callousness. Sure, how much did you look individual difference moderators? Very little tell me more about why I probably should have. Well, I'm a personality researcher, so you know, like clearly certainly make conclusions about humans on average. But you know, there's certain people who are persistently, consistently more along the lines of the antagonism spectrum, and there are those who are more agreeable, and yeah, that has a lot of predictive

value as well. Yeah. Yeah, So I mean two things. One, I'm not conducting the studies myself. Again, I'm a phlosopher reading the research, so I'm kind of relying on what the studies themselves did in terms of measuring individ digital differences. But then secondly, my view, and I really want to stress this because sometimes they can come across as I'm just lumping everyone into one box and saying, well, in this kind of situation, you know, everyone's gonna behave this way,

and this other situation, everyone's gon to behave this other way. No, I mean that never turned out to be the case in the individual situations. There were always individual differences in the behavior that was found. And my own you know, overall view here is that there's going to be a spectrum, So there's going to be you know, if we're comfortable with categorical labels here, which sometimes we're not fine, especially

talking to psychologists who are comfortable with categorical label labels. Here, there's the virtue side of things, there's the vice side of things. There's this middle space in between virtue advice or using the example I just had, compassion and callousness, and my reading of the liture, my takeaway is asked, while many people are in the space middle space, not all are. They're going to be outliers on both ends.

So you're going to have, you know, your your Hitler's on the one end, You're going to have your Gandhi's on the other. And that's why the cover of the the latest book, the Character Gap has you know, precisely on the cover Gandhi on the top and Hitler on the bottom. So just emphasize that it's not all just monolithic here. There's a nice or I think it's possible to think that people fall on a spectrum of virtue

and vice. Gotcha, Okay, so what about harming? Yeah, So same kind of story here, So it follows the same kind of scripts, but I use different examples. So the main one that I focus on this you know, in this element of my research and in learn about in the character gap, the trade books, the Pilgrim experiment, so you know, don't have to say much about that for your listeners. But interestingly, even in the Milgram experiments, it's not I don't think the right lesson to draw is

a really pessimistic, negative, vicious kind of conclusion. Some people do draw that and they see, wow, you know, these participants came in here and within the span of this one session, they essentially were willing to kill an is in person and it's a stranger. Boy. Isn't that just a bad reflection on their character? Aren't they, you know, vicious? And if we're like them, aren't we vicious too? In this in this context, aren't we malevolent or cruel or

or a little like of that? So it's easy to take the I think a lot of this harming lature in that direction, in a more pessimistic direction. So maybe it's worth to highlight kind of counterbalance that with Even in Milgram, there's it's a mixed bag. So you know, famously he had other variations rather than the one that

you know most intro students encounter. So you get variations where they're was no authority figure, or he had variations where there was a conflicting instruction from the authority figure, or the variations where there was authority figure but not in the same room. And what we see and notice many of those variations is that the shock level goes way down. In other words, participants aren't nearly as inclined to turn the dial up and up and up and up up to the xxx level, and in many cases

they keep it at a very moderate, moderate level. So that's that's one point. Even though they had free reign, it was up to them, they could have, you know, continued on to the xxx level and these other vasis if they still choose chose to do so. They tended not to choose to do so. And then there's a second point to make here, which is that even in the famous version, it's not as if, as far as we can tell, the participants were kind of wholeheartedly on

board with what they were doing. They would need to be if they were vicious, because one aspect of advice is a wholehearted motivation. A lack of conflict in one's motivation, so one's beliefs and desires and feelings and so forth line up in a certain direction. And that's also true of a virtue too. A virtuous person is wholehearted. So if that's right, then we would need to see that in participants in the Milgram study to draw the conclusion that they were cruel or or you know, any other

label you wanted to use. As far as I can tell, we didn't see that. What I said we saw was evidence of conflict of internal stress. Sometimes even the external evidence like sweating and you know, shaking and nervousness and this kind of thing, which would suggest a deep internal conflicting's going on. And that's what you would expect the psychological profile vicious person to be. M Yeah, so interesting. And then seria similar findings for lying and cheating the

same pattern. But I think some really cool innovative studies. Maybe I'll just pick up on the cheating for one more illustration. Those examples I gave you from harming and helping tended to be older examples, not to take anything away from them. But in the case of cheating, there's this body of research in the last ten years. It uses a certain kind of paradigm to investigate the level of honesty and the participants when it goes as follows. You have a control group. They're taking a test with

twenty problems. They're told that they're going to be paid, say fifty cents per correct answer on the test. In this control condition, they just work as hard as they can. They turn their answers, the authority figure with the experiment or whoever it is in charge, graise the test and pays them according So there's an opportunity to a cheat.

But then there's this other variation where now called the shredder condition, very similar in some ways fifty cents per correct answer, same tests, different participants, but the key variation is that they're told after they take the test that they will be the ones to grade the test themselves. They'll then just be told they're told their materials will be shredded or destroyed, and they can just verbally report

how many they got correct correct in quotation marks. So we should keep in mind, and so this provides space to cheat if one wants to, and get away with it if one wants to. So. Naturally, in many context people don't cheat because they're afraid of getting caught and the punishment might come with it. But in this context you can cheat if you want to and get away with it, no questions asked, or so one might think, so, and what are the results there? It tends to be

that controls, you know, it depends. It varies from various study to study. You know, one study seven correct out of twenty different group. Now the shredder condition for this particular study, fourteen correct in quotation marks that we should say correct in that shredder condition for that particular study, so double Now is it because that this second group

was just so much smarter. They did so much you know, they were really really good at that test, and so that's why they got fourteen right as supposed to seen. You know, that's possible, but I'm not going to wager any money on that. I'm not going to buy that explanation. I'm gonna buy the other natural explanation that they probably saw an opportunity to make some money. And then it goes on from there, because again, this might give you some pessimistic conclusions, right, or it leads you in a

pessimistic direction. Yeah, oh boy. I might have thought people were honest, but then I see this study, and now I'm thinking a lot of people are dishonest. Well, you know, first of all, don't throw any big conclusions from one study. But secondly they are now interesting spinoffs and in variations, in iterations of it. So I'll just mention one more. You can do the same thing, but where by the same thing, I mean, have this shred air condition set up, but do it at a university with an honor code.

Where for example, my university, Wake Forest, we have ant code here. And so what happens if before they take the test, the participants in this case would it be college students sign the university's utter code. Then they take the test, same tests, same fifty percent fifty cents correct answer incentive, and same opportunity to cheat if you want to, because your answer kee is going to be treaded. Well. In this one study, cheating disappeared. The average performance went

back down to the control levels. So I see something like that and I say, oh, well, wait a minute here, that's a little bit different than I would expect of a dishonest person. I would expect a dishonest person to maybe sign the outer code as a formality. Yeah, I mean, of course I gotta do. Everyone else is doing that, But then turn around and cheat, take advantage of the same opportunity to cheat that they would have had without the honor code on a code. But I loaned behole.

That's not at least this one study suggests that's not what's going to happen. Of course, we need to see some application, uh too. Wow, So there's hope for humanity? Well yeah, I mean there's a hope if you have an assumption working in the back of the discussion. So right now, the picture I've articulated is one where we've kind of got a mixed character. I'm what I call a mix character, kind of mixed bag. There's hope there in the sense that we're not as bad as we

could be. But there's also, you know, disappointment in that we're not nearly as good as we should be. But there's another discussion of hope here, which is about change. Right. Is there any hope even if we are a mixed bag or tend to be like myself included? Is there any hope to be found in moving the needle to try and get better and get closer to that that ideal of virtue? And this will rely on an assumption that personality is malleable, all right, And I know you've

you've argue that it is. I've everything I've read suggested it is. Philosophers, you know, going all o back to play an Arisoto IV always thought that that personality is valuable. By that, I mean it can change, even if it's not going to be overnight or you know some magic

pillaring like that, slow gradual change is possible. So if we take that assumption and combine it with this mixed bag idea, then you know, I think that the natural question I ask is, will are there any strategies or steps or you know, approaches we can adopt to gradually, slowly change in the right direction. Good question. Yeah, so I have some things I might say about that. You know, first all I hope so you know, it would be a real shame with aren't right. I mean, we just said, oh, here, here,

here's how things are. And oh and by the way, your personality and you know, specifically your character can change. But you know, good luck, we'll figure it out. But I think there are there are some ideas that do show some promise. When I want to carefully kind of qualify, I don't saying they're they're you know, they're infallible, or

they're guaranteed to produce results anything like that. So in the last part of the trade book Character Gap, I go over about six or seven such strategies, and some of them I say, they don't look very promising to me. So, for example, the strategy of labeling people as virtuous even if you don't think they are. That's that's a strategy.

You know, you could say to kids or to adults, you know, you know you're a really capassionate person, or you're a really you know, courageous person, even though you don't think. That's just in the hope of getting them to accept that label about themselves and then try to conform their behavior more to that label. That's that is an actual strategy out there. It's been discussed. I'm not

so positive about that one. I can I can elaborate if you like, but just to give you to throw one out there, I go on though, and isolate a couple of strategies that I think are more promising. So one has to do with more and again I'm focusing on more character, more role models, exemplars, heroes, saints and the like of that. Whether these are fictional like Priest and le Mis, or whether they're actual people, whether they're

more historical actual people are like Abraham Lincoln, HARREYT. Tubman, or whether they are contemporary people, whether they're like prominent in society, or whether they are neighbor next door. You know, there are different variations or different ways this can go. But the bazing idea is if we come to admire someone for their honesty, let's say, and at admiration at emotion of admiration inspires in us a desire to emulate them,

to try to become more like them. But I talked about is this feeling of elevation that could lead over time the hope is to gradually becoming more like them. Right, So if I admire Lincoln for his honesty and that inspires in me a desire to become more like him, to emulate him for his honesty, then over time, when I'm confronted with different situations, I could try to think, you know, what might he do in this situation? Or how can I be be like more like Lincoln in

this situation? And can be an aspirite aspirational aim that I gradually get closer and closer to approximating. So I could say more about that. That's just one example, I'll give you give you one other one of a strategy that I think shows some promise, and that's educating ourselves more about some of the tendencies that we tend to have in opposition to virtue that hold us back from

being virtuous. So we mentioned already, for example, the group effect and how in groups, even when an emergency is going on, and we it's fairly clear that emergency is going on, people sometimes don't help. Well, that's striking, it's surprising too many. You know, you asked lay people, what would you predict, what happened, what would you pick you would do in that situation, and you know, overwhelmingly people say I would help or the group would happen. And

often that doesn't manifest itself. Why. Well, one leading explanation is that we are quite moved by considerations of embarrassments more than we realize. Where we have this fear of embarrassing ourselves in group contexts, and that can hold us back and restrict us from doing the right thing, in

this case, helping a stranger in an emergency. Well, what if we became more aware that, what if we learned about some of the research or became more introspective or you know, I discovered some of these tendencies about ourselves, so we're just aware of them in the first place, and then in situations where they might come into a play, we can counterbalance them, We can hold them in check.

So if you know, in the future, when situation where someone needs help anywhere in a group context, and I feel myself holding back and being reticent, I can also reund myself, why is this really worth me blending into the crowd? Or should I step up? Is there any good reason not to step up in that situation and do the right thing. So role models seem promising, and what I call getting the word out and learning more about our tendencies which hold us back seems promising as well. Yeah,

maybe that could be incorporated into education. Yeah, I think both could be, and both in some cases are Some schools do this intentionally. I mean, in one sense, the role modeling is happening already across the board, whether we

think about it or not. I mean, teachers already are serving as role models, and the values that they're espousing to their students and the way they're living their lives in front of their students is serving a role modeling function, even if the school of staff or the teacher particular never gave any thoughts to character model in the first place. So I love that. Yeah, I love that. I try my best to model for students the characteristics that I

want them to try to develop. But it's not easy, right, right, you know, it's not easy, especially when students are not there yet and they're not modeling it back, right, it can be very hard to remain at a sort of higher level of wisdom and compassion and loving kindness when someone's not showing that in return. It's right, You're absolutely rights. And I try to do the same thing myself in a variety of different contexts. So I try to do that with my students. I also have young children, so

sometimes they're the same thing sometimes university here. But I also try and do it, you know, I discipline so in my marriage. You know, there are lots of times when I'm trying to live out what I care about, but while acknowledging that I have a lot of room to grow and I'm a very flawed, mixed bag myself. Yeah, so well, you know it's interesting. I mean, yeah, welcome the club. But I've been thinking about individual differences, and I feel like there's like three lateent classes of that

we could identify. And I've been thinking about constructing a scale to get at this, and I don't think anyone's ever gone in this, but let me know if you think this makes any sense. It feels like there are people who have more of a conflict between the dark

and light forces within. There are those that seem to have accepted their dark side and embrace it almost fully, and there are those that are more unleashed on the light side and just don't have as much of the conflicts in their daily life, Like they're not constantly battling, you know, should I be a nice person or shouldn't It just comes more naturally then that. Of course I

want to. I have the empathy, So I don't think anyone's really done a good job capturing the like the conflict of the force as an individual difference is variable. Well yeah, yeah, but you you'll find plenty of resources in philosophy of course, of the the human history. There's a lot of stories yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, great great empirical story, I mean stories about history. There's also

just a great conceptional work by philosophers too. So I mean, one way to describe what you're saying there is what's Aristotle used as his taxonomy of character. So for Aristotle he had four. This is simplifying, and he had he had more than four, but let's just let's just keep it, keep it simple. Initially, you have four categories of character. He had virtue, he had continence or strength of will, incontinence or weakness of will, and advice, and so you

you have three categories there. But interestingly, the virtue that's wholeheardly oriented towards the lights, to use your terminology, there's no conflict in the virtuous person, the whole hardly oriented in a sortain direction. The vicious person certainly is whole hardly oriented, but of course in the opposite direction, towards

the dark. And then for the continent. And in kind of what they have in common, they're both conflicted, and of course is how they resolve the conflict, right, And that's right, Hey, kind of power comes in as another moderator there. Yeah, But so the kind of person resolves the conflict in favor of the right thing. The kind of person resolves the conflict in favor of the wrong thing or the bad thing, but they're both conflicted, so in a sense, you and Aristotle seem to be on

the same page. Oh, let's end on that note. Let's let that sit there for eternity. Hey, thank you so much for talking with me today and for your real pioneer, truly pioneering work integrating pub psychology and philosophy. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed our conversation me too. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.

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