Psychology Of Virtue: What, Why, And How

Parallel to the emergence of Experimental Philosophy and Experimental Ethics,conception of Virtue became interested by philosophers and psychologists. Virtueethicists and situationists debate on the existence of virtue recently. In this article, weproposed four basic questions on the area of “Psychology of Virtue”, which are: Doesvirtue exist? What does virtue mean in psychological perspective? How to categorizevirtues and how does sociocultural shifting influence the perception of virtues? What isvirtue’s ethical, economic, and social value? Using the methods of experiments, survey,structured interview, social networking and Big Data, and through11studies, we foundthe following.First, the power of situation on moral judgment and ethical behavior wasless than what people usually believe, which provided the evidence for existenceof virtue. Even if virtue were a fake conception, it still exists in our beliefsystem, coloring our perception, influencing our moral and legal judgment, andkeeping consistence.Second, when judging if a person is virtuous or not, folk people usedvalence of behavior and types of thinking of behavioral agent as cues. Evilpeople and normal people had different moral motivations. Specifically, aperson who conducts good intuitively would be recognized as most virtuous,followed by who conducts good deliberately, followed by who conducts evildeliberately, and a person who conducts evil intuitively would be recognized asthe lest virtuous. Agency of prisoners was more than normal people, butcommunion of prisoners was less than normal people.Third, neither using the methods of factor analysis based on lexicalhypothesis nor social networking cluster analysis based on natural languageprocessing, virtue could not be reduce to different dimensions by data-drivenmethods according to the integration of virtue. Sociocultural shifting changedthe importance of different virtues, but changing of beliefs of folk people wasfar beyond it. This discordant makes people gave the judgment of moral decline. Fourth, virtue is necessary but not sufficient for happiness. As a moralcapital, virtue could be transformed to economic capital. Moreover, the densityof social network of organizations would be changed under moral derogation ormoral enhancement.Based on the findings above, we proposed a two-stage personality model tointerpret virtue. Education ideas based on our model were also discussed.