Hiding in plain view: An historical perspective on the study of morality in personality psychology

OBJECTIVE

We aim to identify the major ideas and trends in the study of morality within personality psychology over the past 100 years.

METHOD

Our historical review is organized into three sections, examining moral dimensions in personality from the standpoints of the person as (1) a social actor (moral traits), (2) a motivated agent (the mental infrastructure of morality), and (3) an autobiographical author (moral life stories).

RESULTS

Within the field of personality psychology, a great deal of research into morality has been hiding for decades in plain view. Accordingly, we trace the history of research on socialization and instrumental competence, altruism, moral traits and virtues, the dimensions of morality inherent in the authoritarian personality, personal values, moral reasoning, moral intuitions, and the life stories constructed by people who have distinguished themselves for moral excellence, as evidenced in extraordinary bravery, compassion, or generativity.

CONCLUSIONS

In a multitude of ways, human beings express and experience individual differences in their moral engagement of the world, all of which fall within the purview of personality psychology.

Social impact assessment (SIA) of the Tamale viaduct project in Ghana: Stakeholders management practices, better or worse?

Studies have been done in many different fields on how to manage stakeholders, which shows how important it is to put the stakeholder at the center of any program or project. The study looks at the Social Impact Assessment (SIA) of the Tamale viaduct project. The sample size was established using the results of a census. Data was gathered using a key informant interview guide and structured questionnaires using a snowball sampling technique. Out of 128 affected respondents, 120 questionnaires responded to the tools, and three key informant interviews were conducted with significant stakeholders. The analyses show that many communication channels were employed to get in touch with the project's affected stakeholders. Although they were frequently involved, the stakeholders were not allowed to contribute to the decision-making process. The respondents viewed prioritizing the stakeholders, creating a plan for stakeholder involvement, and planning communication as the most effective stakeholder management techniques. Communication problems were cited as a major obstacle to interacting with the stakeholders.

Cortisol awakening response and testosterone jointly affect adolescents' theory of mind

Adolescence is a critical period for the maturation of neurobiological processes and hormone secretion. Recent studies on the dual-hormone hypothesis have indicated that basal cortisol and testosterone jointly affect dominant and aggressive behavior among adolescents and adults. Whether this hypothesis applies to prosocial-related understanding of others' mental states remains unclear. The present study investigated associations between basal testosterone, basal cortisol (and cortisol awakening response [CAR]), and the cognitive/affective theory of mind (ToM) in 243 adolescents (67.9 % male, aged 14 to 17 years, M_age = 16.09, standard deviation = 0.62). Cognitive ToM (cToM) and affective ToM (aToM) were assessed with a cartoon story reasoning task: In the cToM condition, participants viewed a comic strip story and needed to predict what would happen based on a character's intentions, and in the aToM condition, they viewed a comic strip of two characters interacting and needed to think about what would make the protagonist feel better. The results showed that basal testosterone and basal cortisol did not interact with each other to affect the performance of ToM, either in terms of ToM accuracy or response speed. However, under the condition of low CAR, testosterone is associated with the fast performance of cToM, although the interaction of testosterone and CAR occurred only in female adolescents. Overall, our data provide new evidence for the dual-hormone hypothesis and further extend the hypothesis to social understanding.

How and When Can Employees with Status Motivation Attain Their Status in a Team? The Roles of Ingratiation, OCBI, and Procedural Justice Climate

Despite research having identified two major routes to status: dominance and competence, both routes seem inadequate to capture the “whole picture” of how people get ahead in organizations. Building on social exchange theory and social status literature, we identify two novel paths and their important boundary conditions by which employees with status motivation can achieve status. Specifically, we propose that employees with status motivation obtain status (operationalized as other-perceived status and promotability) by engaging in ingratiation toward their supervisors and organizational citizenship behavior directed toward individuals. In addition, these relationships are weakened in teams where the procedural justice climate is high. Results from four studies conducted in China and the United States, which consist of three experiments (Study 1: N = 240; Study 2: N = 180; Study 4: N = 309) and one field study of 427 employees from 74 teams (Study 3), provide support for most of the propositions we proposed. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Social hierarchies and social networks in humans

Across species, social hierarchies are often governed by dominance relations. In humans, where there are multiple culturally valued axes of distinction, social hierarchies can take a variety of forms and need not rest on dominance relations. Consequently, humans navigate multiple domains of status, i.e. relative standing. Importantly, while these hierarchies may be constructed from dyadic interactions, they are often more fundamentally guided by subjective peer evaluations and group perceptions. Researchers have typically focused on the distinct elements that shape individuals' relative standing, with some emphasizing individual-level attributes and others outlining emergent macro-level structural outcomes. Here, we synthesize work across the social sciences to suggest that the dynamic interplay between individual-level and meso-level properties of the social networks in which individuals are embedded are crucial for understanding the diverse processes of status differentiation across groups. More specifically, we observe that humans not only navigate multiple social hierarchies at any given time but also simultaneously operate within multiple, overlapping social networks. There are important dynamic feedbacks between social hierarchies and the characteristics of social networks, as the types of social relationships, their structural properties, and the relative position of individuals within them both influence and are influenced by status differentiation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies'.

Personality predictors of social status attainment

The current review summarizes recent advances in research on personality predictors of status attainment. In line with previous research, recent studies indicate that extraverted and narcissistic individuals tend to attain status in groups. Research on mediating processes includes a wide range of underlying motivational, behavioral, and interpersonal perception processes. Most generally speaking, those high in extraversion and narcissism attain status because they are more motivated to do so and thus display assertive behavior that makes them look competent. Situational contexts, group tasks, and cultural contexts can moderate the personality-status links by shaping these processes. For example, studies inspired by evolutionary psychology suggest that dominant individuals are more likely to attain status when dominance is instrumental to address a threatening environment.

Viewing Another Act as You Would Creates Altruistic Desires Towards that Other

There has been growing evidence for the existence of distributed, frequently updating social "indices", which are related to the reputation of others and predict altruism towards them. However, the means by which the brain modifies an index based on experiences is still unknown. This work utilizes recent insights on the role of the anterior cingulate cortex during perspective taking, dorsolateral prefrontal representations of context, the temporoparietal junctions relationship with understanding another's background, and dorsomedial prefrontal activation patterns tracking reputation. It aims to show that cognitive empathy causes comparisons between a target's action and the action one would wish to do in the target's position. It also suggests that viewing a target perform the same action that one would in the target's position creates altruistic desires towards the target. By considering these comparisons as central to understanding prosocial and antisocial motivations, a variety of behavioral studies are better explained. This piece seeks to open questions and discussions on the interplay of those brain regions, suggest future approaches to relationship therapy, and establish fundamentals for multi-agent models aimed at normative sociality.