In recent years, misconduct by CEOs has led to firings, scandals, and financial losses for companies. Our study explores personality antecedents of CEO misconduct using Five-Factor Model personality traits and personality disorder profile similarity indices. The sample of 259 CEOs used in the analysis includes CEOs who were involved in well-publicized misconduct scandals as well as CEOs who had no misconduct scandals. Teams of trained raters measured CEO personality using psychometric personality rating scales and video-based assessment methods. Logistic regression results (...) provided some support for hypotheses regarding relationships between ethical misconduct, fraud, excessive risk taking, and sexual misconduct and personality traits including “Big Five” traits and personality disorder profile similarity indices. (shrink)

Clinical fields of the “sciences of the mind” (psychotherapy, psychiatry, etc.) lack integrative conceptual frameworks that have explanatory power. Mainly descriptive-classificatory taxonomies like DSM dominate the field. New taxonomies such as Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) aim to collect scientific knowledge regarding “systems” for “processes” of the brain. These terms have a supradisciplinary” meaning if they are considered in context of Systems Science. This field emerges as a platform of theories like general systems theory, catastrophe theory, synergetics, chaos theory, etc. It (...) provides a lot of abstract concepts, constructs, methods and models. We assume that these tools also enable theoretical integration in the diversified field of clinical practice in the sciences of the mind. Additionally, systems thinking in clinical psychology improves conceptual links to currently network-oriented neurobiology. However, clear definitions of systemic terms are necessary to emerge from their mainly metaphorical use. Here we revise mainly terms like “structure”, “process” and “dynamics” as they are used already in psychology, psychoanalysis, psychopathology and psychiatry in an ill-defined way. For instance, affective-cognitive structures like “life space” or “object representations” can be seen as products of mental processing. These structures, in turn, modulate dynamics of mental processes. Additionally, we suggest a coupled network concept of emotions and motivations as the main subsystem that modulates mental dynamics that results in a qualitative systemic model of the mind. Finally, we assume that a revisited systemic approach could improve interdisciplinary understanding of the mental. ystem for mental dynamics. In this context, we assume that a revisited systemic approach could improve interdisciplinary understanding of the mental. (shrink)

The authors present a neurological theory of how cognitive information and emotional information are integrated in the nucleus accumbens during effective decision making. They describe how the nucleus accumbens acts as a gateway to integrate cognitive information from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus with emotional information from the amygdala. The authors have modeled this integration by a network of spiking artificial neurons organized into separate areas and used this computational model to simulate 2 kinds of cognitive–affective integration. The (...) model simulates successful performance by people with normal cognitive–affective integration. The model also simulates the historical case of Phineas Gage as well as subsequent patients whose ability to make decisions became.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My remarks will outline, from a philosopher’s perspective, challenges and opportunities that I see for a science of virtue. I will touch on three topics: (1) ensuring that the studies are philosophically useful; (2) grappling with issues of measurement; and (3) next steps in moving a science of virtue forward. I approach (1) and (2) through reflections on some recent uses of psychology by philosophers and of philosophy by psychologists; and will argue in part (3) that next steps should (...) entail certain kinds of educational efforts to promote interdisciplinary research. An example is that recently undertaken in a program by the Society of Christian Philosophers that offers opportunities for focused psychological training to philosophy graduate students. These and similar efforts could have far-reaching impacts for the emergence of a philosophically informed science of virtue. (shrink)

Abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq confront us with the question of how seemingly ordinary soldiers could have perpetrated harms against prisoners. In this essay I argue that a Stoic approach to the virtues can provide a bulwark against the social and personal forces that can lead to abusive behavior. In part one, I discuss Abu Ghraib. In two, I examine social psychological explanations of how ordinary, apparently decent people are able to commit atrocities. In three, I address a (...) series of questions: why should we turn to ethics for help with these problems, and why, in particular, to Stoicism instead of other ethical theories, such as utilitarianism or Kantianism? Given the power of situations in influencing behavior, is a turn to character ethics a viable response to problems such as those at Abu Ghraib? I argue in part four that character formation drawing on Stoic values can provide soldiers with the inner resilience to resist the situational factors that press them to unwarranted aggression. (shrink)

This paper examines extant ways of classifying varieties of psychological externalism and argues that they imply a hitherto unrecognized distinction between shallow and deep externalism. The difference is between starting points: shallowly externalist hypotheses begin with the attribution of psychological states to individuals, just as individualistic hypotheses do, whereas deeply externalistic hypotheses begin with agent-environment interaction as the basis of cognitive processes and attribute psychological states to individuals as necessary for such interaction. The over-arching aim is to show how deep (...) externalism works and what its implications are for psychological and philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

This study investigates the mediator role of attachment avoidance and the moderator role of rejection sensitivity on the links between life satisfaction and psychological capital. This study uses the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale, Rejection Sensitive Scale, Positive Psychological Capital Scale, and Life Satisfaction Scale among 999 Chinese young adults as subjects. The results presented that life satisfaction had a significant positive predictive effect on PsyCap. Mediation analysis of this study shows that attachment avoidance mediated the association between life satisfaction (...) and PsyCap. Furthermore, moderated mediation analysis indicated that rejection sensitivity moderates the link between life satisfaction and attachment avoidance. Compared with individuals with low rejection sensitivity, individuals with high rejection sensitivity show more attachment avoidance under low life satisfaction. This study helps understand the relationship between life satisfaction and PsyCap from the perspective of rejection sensitivity theory and attachment theory and has implications for guiding college students toward strengthening PsyCap and weakening rejection sensitivity. (shrink)

Personality traits describe dispositions influencing individuals' behavior and performance at work. However, in the context of personnel selection, the use of personality measures has continuously been questioned. To date, research in selection settings has focused uniquely on predicting task performance, missing the opportunity to exploit the potential of personality traits to predict non-task performance. Further, personality is often measured with self-report inventories, which are susceptible to self-distortion. Addressing these gaps, the planned study seeks to design new personality measures to be (...) used in the selection context to predict a wide range of performance criteria. Specifically, we will develop a situational judgment test and a behavior description interview, both assessing Big Five personality traits and Honesty-Humility to systematically compare these new measures with traditional self-report inventories regarding their criterion-related validity to predict four performance criteria: task performance, adaptive performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behavior. Data will be collected in a simulated selection procedure. Based on power analyses, we aim for 200 employed study participants, who will allow us to contact their supervisors to gather criterion data. The results of this study will shed light on the suitability of different personality measures to predict an expanded range of performance criteria. (shrink)

Indirect situationist critiques of virtue ethics grant that virtue exists and is possible to acquire, but contend that given the low probability of success in acquiring it, a person genuinely interested in behaving as morally as possible would do better to rely on situationist strategies - or, in other words, strategies of environmental or ecological engineering or control. In this paper, I develop a partial answer to this critique drawn from work in early Confucian ethics and in contemporary philosophy and (...) psychology. From early Confucian ethics, I lean on the concept of li, or ritual. Ritual represents both a set of situational manipulations that are especially effective at directly producing moral behavior and at indirectly cultivating virtue over time, and also a virtue that consists of facility with and expertise in these situational manipulations. Appealing to the particular example of social power, I then argue that one is justified in attempting to acquire virtue if one knows that one will frequently encounter circumstances in which purely situationist strategies lose effectiveness, if these circumstances also carry moral urgency: the risk of great harm or opportunity for great benefit to others is high, and if utilizing the potent combination of situationist strategies and virtue envisioned by the early Confucians as ritual is possible. (shrink)

Gossip is rarely praised. There seems little virtuous that is about talking behind someone’s back. Whether there is anything virtuous about gossip, however, depends on the kind of gossip. Some gossip is idle, but some evaluative gossip promulgates and enforces norms. When properly motivated, such gossip effects positive change in society and counts as gossiping well. The virtue of gossiping well even includes some kinds of false gossip, namely the sort that exaggerates a pre-existing trait, thereby creating a caricature of (...) a person’s character in order to establish a moral exemplar (or anti-exemplar). (shrink)

Men typically express more willingness than women to perpetrate fraudulent acts like lying in negotiations. However, women express just as much willingness in some cases. We develop and test a theory to explain these mixed findings. Specifically, we hypothesize that situational cues that bring about competitive or empathic feelings mitigate sex differences in lying to negotiation counterparts. Results from four experiments confirm our hypotheses. Experiment 1 showed that men and women express equal willingness to lie when negotiating with counterparts toward (...) whom they felt either great competitiveness or empathy. Experiment 2 extended these results by confirming that men only express more willingness to lie absent competitive or empathic feelings towards a counterpart. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that inducing competitive or empathic feelings toward a counterpart eliminated sex differences in lying by leading women to lie more and men to lie less, respectively. Overall, our results suggest that the extent to which negotiators experience competitive or empathic feelings play important roles in whether sex differences in lying in negotiations emerge. (shrink)

Way-finding (WF) is the ability to move around efficiently and find the way from a starting point to a destination. It is a component of spatial navigation, a coordinate and goal-directed movement of one’s self through the environment. In the present study, the relationship between WF tasks (route tracing and shortcut finding) and individual factors were explored with the hypothesis that WF tasks would be predicted by different types of cognitive, affective, motivational variables and personality factors. A group of 116 (...) university students (88 F.) was conducted along a route in a virtual environment and then asked first to trace the same route again, and then to find a shortcut between the start and end points. Several instruments assessing visuospatial working memory, mental rotation ability, self-efficacy, spatial anxiety, positive attitude to exploring, and personality traits were administered. The results showed that a latent spatial ability factor (measured with the visuospatial working memory and mental rotations tests) - controlled for gender - predicted route-tracing performance, while self-report measures of anxiety, efficacy, and pleasure in exploring, and some personality traits were more likely to predict shortcut-finding performance. We concluded that both personality and cognitive abilities affect WF performance, but differently, depending on the requirements of the task. (shrink)

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character (...) traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework. (shrink)

This study explored the relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy in trait mindfulness and subjective wellbeing. In this study, 323 Chinese kindergarten teachers were measured using the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, Emotional Intelligence Scale, General Self-efficacy Scale, and Subjective Wellbeing Scale. The study found that subjective wellbeing can be predicted directly from trait mindfulness. Emotional intelligence could mediate the relationship between trait mindfulness and subjective wellbeing. Self-efficacy could mediate the relationship between trait mindfulness and subjective wellbeing. In addition, emotional intelligence (...) and self-efficacy played a sequential mediating role between trait mindfulness and subjective wellbeing. This study revealed the relationship between kindergarten teachers’ trait mindfulness and subjective wellbeing through structural equation modeling and understood its role path, enriching the research on the Chinese preschool teachers in the field, and providing a literature reference for the international community to understand the Chinese kindergarten teachers. At the same time, the study also has some limitations, such as the use of a cross-sectional design method, a relatively single method, and the impact of COVID-19. However, we believe that this study will further enrich the research literature on the relationship between trait mindfulness and subjective wellbeing of Chinese kindergarten teachers. (shrink)

Significant research attention has been devoted to understanding the ethical behavior of leaders (i.e., the moral person) and how leaders’ expectations influence their followers’ ethical behavior (...

Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia produced by (...) low-level , emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable. (shrink)

The early work by Gilbert Harman and John Doris on character and situationism has fostered a vast literature over the past 15 years. Yet despite all this work, there are many important issues which remain largely unexplored. The goal of this paper is to briefly outline eight promising research directions: neglected moral virtues, neglected non-moral virtues, virtue assessment and measurement, replication, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics, positive accounts of character trait possession, prescriptive situationism, and virtue cultivation.

Business Ethics: A European Review, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 231-243, April 2021.

This paper introduces a body of research on Organizational Behavior and Industrial/organizational Psychology that expands the range of empirical evidence relevant to the ongoing character-situation debate. This body of research, mostly neglected by moral philosophers, provides important insights to move the debate forward. First, the OB/io scholarship provides empirical evidence to show that social environments like organizations have significant power to shape the character traits of their members. This scholarship also describes some of the mechanisms through which this process of (...) reshaping character takes place. Second, the character-situation debate has narrowly focused on situational influences that affect behavior episodically and haphazardly. The OB/io research, however, highlights the importance of distinguishing such situational influences from influences that, like organizational influences, shape our character traits because they are continuous and coordinated. Third, the OB/io literature suggests that most individuals display character traits that, while local to the organization, can be consistent across situations. This puts pressure on the accounts of character proposed by traditional virtue ethics and situationism and provides empirical support to interactionist models based on cognitive-affective processing system theories of personality. Finally, the OB/io literature raises important challenges to the possibility of achieving virtue, provides valuable and untapped resources to cultivate character, and suggests new avenues of normative and empirical research. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between workplace bullying and employee silence as well as its mechanism. This paper collects data from 322 employees of three Chinese enterprises in two waves, with a 2 months interval between the two waves. Moreover, this paper uses confirmatory factor analysis, a bootstrapping mediation test, a simple slope test, and other methods to verify the hypothesis. We find that: WB is positively correlated with ES; psychological safety and affective commitment mediated (...) the relationship between WB and ES, respectively, and these two variables have a chain mediating effect in the above relationship; and a forgiveness climate moderates this chain mediating effect by weakening the negative impact of WB on PS. Our findings can effectively guide organizations to ultimately adjust their management style, pay attention to employees’ cognitive and emotional resources, and formulate some measures to curb WB in organizations. (shrink)

In recent years, deep learning as the requirement of higher education for students has attracted the attention of many scholars, and previous studies focused on defining deep learning as the deep processing of knowledge of the brain, however, in the process of knowledge processing, the brain not only involves the deep processing of information but also participates in learning consciously and emotionally. Therefore, this research proposed a four-factor model hypothesis for deep learning that includes deep learning investment, deep cognitive-emotional experience, (...) deep information processing, and deep learning meta-cognitive. In addition, the research proposed teachers’ emotional support perceived by students has an effect on the four factors of deep learning. Through SPSS 26 and AMOS 24, this research has verified the four-factor model of deep learning applying exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis and verified that the perceived teacher emotional support has an impact on the four factors of students’ deep learning using the SEM. (shrink)

In recent years, many online communities have launched opinion-gathering activities to promote user participation in innovation and improve the quality of new products. The current methods for online innovation activities can be divided into two categories: cognitive guidance and affective guidance. However, the studies on online communities have mainly focused on user engagement motivations, and little attention has been paid to investigating the impact and underlying mechanism of innovation guidance on user participation at the linguistic level. This study first collected (...) secondary data from NetEase.com and conducted an econometric model to explore the impact of cognitive guidance and affective guidance on users’ participation in online innovation activities. Subsequently, we investigated the impact mechanism of different innovation guidance methods on user participation through two experiments, here by drawing on mental simulation theory. The experimental results showed that outcome simulation and process simulation imposed a dual mediating effect of innovation guidance on user participation. In addition, we also found that product types moderate the dual mediating effect of outcome simulation and process simulation. The findings can deepen and expand the research on user participation while providing practical implications for companies and platforms as they attempt to promote user participation in innovation activities. (shrink)

In this article, I provide a guide to some current thinking in empirical moral psychology on the nature of moral intuitions, focusing on the theories of Haidt and Narvaez. Their debate connects to philosophical discussions of virtue theory and the role of emotions in moral epistemology. After identifying difficulties attending the current debate around the relation between intuitions and reasoning, I focus on the question of the development of intuitions. I discuss how intuitions could be shaped into moral expertise, outlining (...) Haidt’s emphasis on innate factors and Narvaez’s account in terms of a social-cognitive model of personality. After a brief discussion of moral relativism, I consider the implications of the account of moral expertise for our understanding of the relation between moral intuitions and reason. I argue that a strong connection can be made if we adopt a broad conception of reason and a narrow conception of expertise. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against a perceptual model of moral epistemology. We should not reject the claim that there is a sense in which, on some occasions, emotions may be said to be perceptions of values or reasons. But going further than this, and taking perception as a model for moral epistemology is unhelpful and unilluminating. By focusing on the importance of the dispositions and structures of the self to moral knowledge, I bring out important disanalogies between moral epistemology (...) and typical cases of perceptual expertise. As a result, how we gain, or fail to gain, moral knowledge should not be understood in terms of the operation of a perceptual capacity. (shrink)

Abstract: The concept of a situation underlying the debate between moral situationists and dispositionists conceals various underexplored complexities. Some of those issues have been engaged recently in the so-called psychology of situations, but they have been slow to receive attention in mainstream philosophy. I invoke various distinctions among situations, and show how situationists have selectively chosen certain types of situations that, for conceptual reasons, skew the argument in their favour. I introduce the concept of a ‘virtue-calibrated situation’, and argue that (...) if the person–situation debate is to move forward in philosophy as it has in psychology, it must focus on such situations. I bring to bear evidence from analytic and continental philosophy, as well as from social and personality psychology. (shrink)

This paper examines assumptions concerning the relationship between citizenship, justice, and well-being, based on representative political philosophies, including egoism, utilitarianism, libertarianism, liberalism, and communitarianism. A previous paper raised the possibility of an inter-disciplinary framework for collaboration between psychology and political philosophy. This study picks up that thread and attempts to actualize a collaborative research effort based on a framework grounded in positive political psychology. The first part of this study reflects on the methodology situated between empirical psychology and philosophy in (...) reference to the debates caused by psychological and philosophical situationism. In response to its criticism against virtue ethics, the possibility of reconstructing it on empirical psychology has paradoxically emerged. Similarly, this study validates assumptions on political philosophies employing the psychological method concerning well-being. Accordingly, the central part examines the plausibility of the assumptions by empirical evidence obtained from two internet surveys in Japan. The relationships between citizenship, justice, and well-being are the most substantial in the communitarian assumption. The exploratory factor analysis of the two surveys illuminates that the correlations between citizenship, justice, and well-being are substantial. This relationship denies the egoism assumption. Moreover, almost all correlations between the three are higher based on virtue-related indicators than hedonic ones. These findings are not in tune with the utilitarian assumption and are most congruent to the communitarian assumption. In addition, citizenship and justice correlate more with political well-being than overall well-being. As these are more directly associated with political well-being in the communitarian assumption, this result aligns with the assumption. Furthermore, the positive relationship between disparity elimination and well-being fits the liberal rather than the libertarian assumption. Nevertheless, the substantial correlation between ethical justice and well-being is higher by virtue-related indicators than hedonic indicators, suggesting distributive justice is associated with the ethical dimension. Again, this fits the communitarian assumption rather than the liberal assumption. Thus, philosophical psychology empirically verifies the interdependence of the three conceptions and the relative plausibility of the communitarian assumption. Moreover, as the relationship between the three is essential for political philosophies, the result increases the reliability of communitarianism. (shrink)

Advocates of moral enhancement through pharmacological, genetic, or other direct interventions sometimes explicitly argue, or assume without argument, that traditional moral education and development is insufficient to bring about moral enhancement. Traditional moral education grounded in a Kohlbergian theory of moral development is indeed unsuitable for that task; however, the psychology of moral development and education has come a long way since then. Recent studies support the view that moral cognition is a higher-order process, unified at a functional level, and (...) that a specific moral faculty does not exist. It is more likely that moral cognition involves a number of different mechanisms, each connected to other cognitive and affective processes. Taking this evidence into account, we propose a novel, empirically informed approach to moral development and education, in children and adults, which is based on a cognitive-affective approach to moral dispositions. This is an interpretative approach that derives from the cognitive-affective personality system (Mischel and Shoda, 1995). This conception individuates moral dispositions by reference to the cognitive and affective processes that realise them. Conceived of in this way, moral dispositions influence an agent's behaviour when they interact with situational factors, such as mood or social context. Understanding moral dispositions in this way lays the groundwork for proposing a range of indirect methods of moral enhancement, techniques that promise similar results as direct interventions whilst posing fewer risks. (shrink)

Some people constantly raise their eyebrows, others frequently tighten their lower eyelids, and still others continuously smile. Are these purely coincidental phenomena, or could they reflect an in...