Photo courtesy of Ken Bennett/ WFU
William Fleeson, professor of psychology, recently received a $5 million research grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to pursue his research regarding the field of moral psychology.
The project is seeking to develop a platform from which researchers can begin to do more expansive studies regarding morality. Aspects of this research will be taking place here on campus at Wake Forest.
How would you describe the goal of this project?
We want to kick-start a new field of study on the morally exceptional, which we hope will eventually turn into a widespread interest in the population in enhancing morality in children and in schools.
How did this project come together?
We’ve been a team that’s been working together for five years. The team is myself, Michael Furr, a psychology professor, Eranda Jayawickreme, a psychologist, Christian B. Miller, a philosophy professor and Angela Knobel, a philosophy professor at the Catholic University.
We worked together because we had separately been working on similar projects that were studying whether personality actually exists. [We] ended up working together on a project five years ago. In that project we learned that moral character does exist as a personality variable. If you take a person who is moral in one set of situations, they’ll tend to be more moral in different situations, too.
When those projects ended, we thought we worked well together and still needed to work together as a team. We decided to build on what we had and work off the assumption that if it’s true that some people are more moral than others, and if it’s also true that the average person is not especially moral, it may be that if we want to study morality, we should be studying the morally exceptional.
How do you plan on carrying out your research for this project?
There are two answers to that question. First, more than half of this project is devoted to helping other researchers carry out their projects.
The second part is that we are going to be doing research as a team, too. We have eight studies planned here. For example, we will have a group of subjects name for us a person that they find to be morally exceptional and answer a questionnaire about that person. Then we’ll look at the specific people they wrote about.
We will also go to community leaders and ask them to nominate people they know who are morally exceptional. We might also just ask people how moral they are on a scale of one to seven. We actually have research that shows that people don’t always say top of the scale.
Some people say “I’m pretty moral but not perfect,” other people say average, other people say they aren’t moral at all. They don’t just lie.
The funny thing is, if you ask people that know them — friends, family, colleagues — they’ll say the same thing, so there’s agreement about who the moral people are. Morality is such an intangible and difficult to define concept.
How do you plan on defining it within this study?
It’s not indefinable. Everybody is pretty good at defining morality pretty quickly; it may be hard to agree on it, but it’s not hard to define.
First we’ll start with some common sense, commonly agreed upon, conceptions of morality.
Moral people are fair, generous, not selfish; they are honest, they don’t break promises, steal, cheat, etc. There are some differences of opinion, too, but we recognize that, and we are actually going to use that as an opportunity. Instead of thinking of that as a problem it might be the case that we can use that to [better] understand the psychological processes that makes someone moral by taking people who are both considered extremely moral but by different groups of people.
What is your hope for the outcome of this study?
We hope that there will be a network of researchers that reaches a critical mass going forward that will start to generate enough interest, energy and resources towards a general study of the morally exceptional. We also hope to answer specific questions in our own research, such as “What are the morally exceptional like as people?” “How did they get that way?”
If we can know those things, we can start to maybe encourage more people to follow along those lines. Another question we hope to answer is, “what are the psychological processes that are leading them to moral behavior?” If we can understand the processes that cause moral behavior then we can encourage more moral behavior. However, our biggest goal is to create a network of researchers who are interested in this question.
How can Wake Forest students get involved with this study?
Wake Forest students are already involved! They can be involved as research assistants. For instance, Wake Forest students are involved in group discussions aiming to answer a lot of the questions that you’ve asked.
We will also have events on campus. For example, next year and the year after we are going to bring in speakers that are going to talk about this topic. These will be people like David Brooks and others who are prominent in the media. These will be university wide lectures and students can come to those. I’m excited about this. As I was just telling my class the other day, my work is much better because of the conversations I have with undergraduates at Wake Forest. I don’t know if this would be true at other universities.
Do you have anything else you want to add?
We are just extremely grateful. I’m a psychology researcher because I feel like there are a lot of people doing really bad things to each other and I need to be involved somehow in trying to stop that. If we can make more people stand up to bad people, then we can maybe teach people how to stop the bad people.