Eavesdropping on character: Assessing everyday moral behaviors

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Abstract

Despite decades of interest in moral character, comparatively little is known about moral behavior in everyday life. This paper reports a novel method for assessing everyday moral behaviors using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR)—a digital audio-recorder that intermittently samples snippets of ambient sounds from people’s environments—and examines the stability of these moral behaviors. In three samples (combined N = 186), participants wore an EAR over one or two weekends. Audio files were coded for everyday moral behaviors (e.g., showing sympathy, gratitude) and morally-neutral comparison language behaviors (e.g., use of prepositions, articles). Results indicate that stable individual differences in moral behavior can be systematically observed in daily life, and that their stability is comparable to the stability of neutral language behaviors.

Introduction

“Living a moral, constructive life is defined by a weighted sum of countless individual, morally relevant behaviors enacted day in and day out (plus an occasional particularly self-defining moment).”

Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek (2007)

Morality has received a great deal of attention from psychologists in recent years. However, little of this work has examined moral behavior in naturalistic, “real-world” contexts. As such, the present study aims to establish a novel, reliable method for objectively and unobtrusively measuring moral behaviors that are observed in ordinary, everyday settings, and to use this method to examine the stability of individual differences in moral behaviors.

To place the current work into context, we highlight important gaps in the existing literature on morality. First, although classic social psychological research (e.g., Darley & Batson, 1973; Milgram, 1963) examined overt behavior, modern research has largely focused on moral cognition and emotion. Psychology has lately seen a surge of research on moral decision-making and the cognitive and emotional factors that influence moral judgments (Aquino and Freeman, 2009, Graham et al., 2012, Schwitzgebel, 2009), but, little contemporary work has examined overt moral behaviors, especially frequent, everyday moral acts (as opposed to exceptional moral acts).

To the extent that moral behavior has been studied, the research relies heavily on self-reported and laboratory-based measures. This is appropriate for research on moral identity, values, and judgments, but is problematic for studying moral behavior. People, on average, view themselves in a positive light (Alicke & Sedikides, 2009) and are especially likely to have distorted self-views for traits and behaviors that are highly evaluative (i.e., positively or negatively valenced; Vazire, 2010). Moral behaviors are arguably among the most evaluative behaviors (Goodwin et al., 2014, Wojciszke et al., 1998), which raises concerns about the accuracy of self-reports. Thus, although both self-views and behaviors are important to study and understand, self-reports of behavior are an inadequate substitute for measuring actual moral behavior (Graham, 2014).

At the same time, although studies have directly assessed moral behavior, these have mostly taken place in staged laboratory environments (e.g., Bateson et al., 2006, Batson et al., 1997, Schwitzgebel, 2009, Zhong et al., 2010). This methodology is insufficient for examining individual differences in moral behavior because people’s laboratory behavior may not adequately reflect everyday behavior (Graham, 2014). Recent work has begun to explore morality in more natural contexts (Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014), but this work frequently relies on self-reports of behaviors. To begin developing a more complete understanding of everyday moral functioning, the present study seeks to establish a reliable method for objectively observing moral behaviors outside the laboratory.

The existing literature emphasizes the variability of morality (Graham et al., 2012, Hartshorne and May, 1928), and how even subtle situational manipulations influence moral actions (Blanken et al., 2015, Darley and Batson, 1973, Doris, 2002). Although this emphasis has sparked important research, relatively little of this work directly addresses the stability of individual differences in moral behavior. Where individual differences in morality have been examined, the focus has usually been on differences in moral perceptions and values (e.g., moral foundations; Graham et al., 2011), rather than actual moral behavior. To fill this gap, we examine the temporal stability of individual differences in actual, naturalistically observed, moral behaviors.

Section snippets

Present study

We present a method for objectively measuring everyday moral behaviors and examine the degree to which individual differences in these behaviors are stable across context and time. We use repeated observations in natural contexts to examine the consistency of moral behaviors—that is, whether people who act in more morally desirable ways than others at one time are also likely do so at another time. Our goal is to provide evidence for the viability of a new naturalistic method for studying

Participants

We report how we determined our sample sizes, all data exclusions, and all relevant measures in the study. We used data from three samples, for a total of 186 participants.1 Sample 1 consisted of 11

Descriptive statistics

The percentage of files in which participants displayed the moral behaviors can be found in Table 2, along with base rates for the matched neutral language behaviors. The moral behaviors were modestly correlated with each other (average within-sample |r| = .26, range = .03–.71), suggesting that the moral behaviors we assessed were diverse and captured non-overlapping variance in participants’ moral acts. There were substantial individual differences in how often participants engaged in the moral

Discussion

The present study establishes a novel method for naturalistically assessing everyday moral behaviors, and provides evidence that there are substantially stable individual differences in these moral behaviors. Indeed, individual differences in moral behavior were at least as stable as individual differences in neutral language behaviors. This is impressive—we expected neutral language behaviors to be highly reliable and stable (because they can be measured without coder error and because they

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Wake Forest University Character Project funded by The John Templeton Foundation and National Science Foundation Grants BCS-1025330 and BCS-1125553. The collection of the original EAR data was supported by National Institute of Health grants R03CA137975, 3R01AT004698, and 5R01AT004698.

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