Self, Motivation, and Virtue

Innovative Interdisciplinary Research

Nancy E. Snow, Darcia Narvaez, Nancy E. Snow, Darcia Narvaez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429536441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume features new findings by nine interdisciplinary teams of researchers on the topics of self, motivation, and virtue. Nine chapters bringing together scholars from the fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology advance our substantive understanding of these important topics, and showcase a variety of research methods of interdisciplinary interest.

Essays on Buddhism and the self in the context of romantic relationships, the development of personal projects and virtue, the notion of self-distancing and its moral impact, virtues as self-integrated traits, humility and the self in loving encounter, the importance of nation and faith in motivating virtue in western and non-western countries, roles for the self and virtue in eudaimonic growth, overcoming spiritual violence and sacramental shame in Christian communities, and an investigation into the moral self highlight the range and diversity of topics explored in this volume. The concept of deep integration also characterizes this work: each member of the interdisciplinary teams was fully and equally invested in their project from inception to completion. This approach invites teams to examine their disciplinary assumptions, rethink familiar concepts, and adjust methodologies in order to view their topics with fresh eyes.

The result is not only new findings of substantive and methodological interest, but also an interesting glimpse into the thinking of the researchers as they sought interdisciplinary common ground in their research. Self, Motivation, and Virtue will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, moral psychology, neuroscience, and sociology who are working on these topics.

1
Self, Motivation, and Virtue, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deep Integration

Moin Syed, Colin G. DeYoung, and Valerie Tiberius

The Self, Motivation, and Virtue Project (Snow & Narvaez, 2015) was developed “to open avenues of inquiry into virtue using the framework of the ‘self,’ instead of ‘personality,’ to require deep and ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration, and to stimulate methodological innovation into the study of virtue.” But what does this mean to use a “framework of self” instead of “personality”? What do we mean by “self” and “personality”? This is a difficult distinction to make succinctly, as the two terms are not used consistently across psychology and associated disciplines.

In this chapter, we review the major inconsistencies in the use of “self” and “personality,” as well as “identity,” which is another key concept that is not often clearly distinguished from self and personality. The thrust of our argument is that the concept of personality—when conceptualized as extending beyond personality traits—provides a broad framework for understanding not only self and identity, but also consistent individual differences in motivation and virtue.

Additionally, our own interest in these issues arose out of concerns about how different aspects of personality are relevant for well-being. However, “well-being” is another term that is conceptualized and studied in divergent ways, especially when moving beyond psychological conceptions. We review these different perspectives following our discussion of self, identity, and personality and suggest that understanding well-being in the context of individuals’ personal projects (i.e., active goals) provides one possible strategy for finding common ground among different conceptions.

We approach these issues from our individual perspectives as a developmental psychologist, a personality psychologist, and a philosopher. Perhaps because the philosopher among us takes David Hume as her inspiration, we found that differences between the two psychologists from different sub-fields were as significant as the differences between the psychologists and the philosopher. Hume was an empiricist philosopher who attempted to locate the self, virtue, and indeed all of ethics in a naturalistic picture of human psychology. The Humean tradition in philosophy is, therefore, more amenable to integration with psychology than other philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, we did have three different disciplinary perspectives that led to different assumptions and understandings of self, identity, personality, and well-being. We have not always agreed on all of the issues presented in this chapter, and in some ways still do not, but through collaboration we worked toward a deep integration that has refined our understanding. We highlight some of these challenges to deep integration throughout the chapter.

The Self and Identity

Few concepts in the social sciences are as confused and diffuse as the “self.” Even looking within the field of psychology, there is no agreed-upon definition of the self, and thus the term is not consistently used. Accordingly, a critical starting point for understanding the relations among self, motivation, and virtue is gaining clarity on what, exactly, is the “self.”

William James (1890), Charles H. Cooley (1902), and George Herbert Mead (1934) are often credited with laying the foundations for psychological understandings of self and identity. Importantly, even these earliest articulations of the self eschewed a singular global concept of “the self” in favor of more specific aspects of the self. For example, James made a distinction between the “me” self and the “I” self. The “me” is the self as object, what is consciously known about the self (and which he further divided into the material self, social self, and spiritual self). In contrast, the “I” is the self as subject, the knower of who one is.

Although both James and Mead emphasized the role of internal and social/interactional processes, James relatively favored the internal whereas Mead relatively favored the social/interactional. This crude alignment is useful for understanding the subsequent intellectual lineages of these two early influential figures as researchers sought to develop formal theories, experiments, and assessments that followed from their ideas (see Hammack, 2015). Mead’s work went on to heavily influence sociological and social psychological concepts of the self, which tend to emphasize the nature of the self within specific social contexts. In contrast, James’s work was heavily influential in developmental psychological concepts of the self, which tend to emphasize internal processes of continuity, coherence, and person-environment fit. Herein we briefly review each of these broad perspectives.

Social Psychological Approaches to Self and Identity

Although the self is a concept widely used in social psychology, it is not used consistently or coherently. In their introduction to the Handbook of Self and Identity, Leary and Tangney (2012) organize definitions of the self into five categories: 1) self as the total person, 2) self as personality, 3) self as experiencing subject (I self, or self as subject), 4) self as beliefs about oneself (me self, or self as object), and 5) self as executive agent (self as cybernetic system). They reject the first two definitions, largely because those definitions rely on a global “self” that they feel is not specific enough to be useful. The latter three definitions, they argue, can be synthesized into a higher-order process of reflexive thinking, or “the ability to take oneself as the object of one’s attention and thought” (p. 6), with the self then being defined as “the set of psychological mechanisms or processes that allows organisms to think consciously about themselves” (p. 6).

One confusion that arises with this synthesized definition of the self stems from what seems to be a misunderstanding of two distinct linguistic functions for the word “self.” “Self” can refer to a distinct entity, typically a psychological entity such as the conscious experience and understanding of the individual’s own being as a coherent agent (encompassing the I and the me, as we have already discussed, and aligning with the aforementioned definitions 3 and 4). However, it can also simply signify reflexivity, as it often does when used as a prefix, as in the terms “self-regulation” and “self-control” (aligning with definition 5). Many social psychologists seem to take the existence of these terms as evidence that the “self” as a psychological entity is somehow necessary for inhibiting impulses—as if it were the “self” that was doing the regulation or exercising control. Instead, however, the prefix “self” here is simply indicating reflexivity. Human beings are systems that regulate themselves, also known as “cybernetic” systems (DeYoung, 2015). From our perspective, therefore, the fifth definition offered earlier should also be excluded from the meaning of “self” because, in fact, the whole person is a cybernetic system.

In the context of this linguistic analysis, the case of “self-esteem” is interesting because “self” in this term can be interpreted either as a psychological entity or as a signifier of reflexivity. In the latter case, the individual esteems (evaluates) itself. In the former, it is precisely the conscious understanding of what one is that is being evaluated. In this case, the two meanings of “self” are largely congruent; however, in many cases (as with “self-regulation” and “self-control”) they are not, and we observe that this has given the social psychological definition of self a rather amorphous and confused quality. Many unconscious processes are involved in self-regulation and self-control, and we do not think that these should be considered part of the “self” as that term is typically used in psychology. Thus, from our perspective, the self should be limited to the self as experiencing subject and the self as beliefs about oneself, thereby remaining largely congruent with James’s original definitions of the I self and the me self.

One peculiar phrasing commonly used in social psychology is “self and identity.” There is the Handbook of Self and Identity and also the journal Self and Identity, which is the flagship journal of the International Society of Self and Identity. The frequent use of both terms suggests that they are believed to be different in some way, but to the best of our knowledge there is no meaningful distinction between them to be made. In their introductory chapter to the handbook, Leary and Tangney (2012) devote considerable attention to the definitional and conceptual thicket of the self but do not even offer a definition of identity, let alone how it may differ from self.

Social psychological approaches to identity have largely focused on group-based processes, heavily influenced by social identity theory. Tajfel (1981) defined social identity as “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (p. 255; italics in original), and the concept has been primarily used to understand situational in-group and out-group behavior (Ashmore, Deaux, & McLaughlin-Volpe, 2004; Verkuyten, 2016).

Tajfel’s definition, referenced earlier, is frequently cited in the literature verbatim, often followed by a paraphrase of the contrasting definition of personal identity as the focus on aspects of the self that individuals believe make them unique. But Tajfel did not provide a definition of personal identity and was clear that there was much more to identity than he was considering with social identity. Nevertheless, social psychology has essentially defined the conceptual universe of identity as group memberships (social, or collective, identities) that connect individuals to others, and as personal identities, which are characteristics that make individuals unique (e.g., Ashmore et al., 2004; Brewer, 1991).

Developmental Psychological Approaches to Self and Identity

From the perspective of developmental psychology there is no meaningful difference between self and identity. The lack of distinction between the terms is largely due to convention rather than researchers in the field actively sorting out the differences in the meaning of the terms. When “self” is used by developmental psychologists, it is typically applied to individual reflective processes occurring before adolescence (e.g., mirror self-recognition in infancy; Suddendorf & Butler, 2013). Following Erik Erikson (1950), developmental psychologists tend to understand identity as arising in early adolescence in response to broadening cognitive capacities that facilitate deeper reflective thinking and an expanding social milieu that affords greater social comparison (Habermas & Köber, 2015; Meeus, 2011). Thus, the distinction, if any, corresponds to one of maturity or sophistication rather than conceptually distinct psychological phenomena.

The use of the terms “social identity” and “personal identity” in social psychology is different from how they are used in developmental psychology. Indeed, the whole concept of identity is understood and studied from a very different perspective (Syed, Azmitia, & Cooper, 2011). The developmental perspective on identity is rooted in Erikson’s (1950, 1968) psychosocial theory of lifespan development, which as noted, was heavily influenced by William James’s conceptualization of the self. In particular, Erikson was taken by the concept of the I self, exploring individuals’ efforts to develop a stable internal sense of self, or identity. For Erikson identity corresponds to a sense of inner sameness, coherence, and integration of the self across time and place.

Erikson also used the terms personal identity and social identity, as well as ego identity, but he used them in a different way than how social psychology has defined them. Erikson conceptualized personal identity as individuals’ personal beliefs and goals in relation to culturally relevant roles. Social identity was defined in a similar way, as connections individuals have to various group memberships, but also connects identity processes to larger social structures, taking into consideration how individuals develop identities within a specific cultural context (Way & Rogers, 2015). So both personal and social identities correspond to the me self. Finally, ego identity represents the synthesizing process used to establish and maintain personal continuity, closely aligning with James’s conceptualization of the I self. Whereas the social identity perspective largely sets aside the concept of personal identity in favor of exploring social identity, the developmental perspective views the two as closely linked; that personal and social identities can work together to enhance or constrain individual development.

The social and developmental approaches to self and identity have largely operated as parallel streams of research, although this has been more extreme in the social psychological literature. For example, in Leary and Tangney’s (2012) review of the history of self and identity in psychology there is no reference at all to Erikson’s theory or the wealth of empirical research that has followed it. Even when discussing the relevance of psychoanalytical theory for self and identity, Leary and Tangney do not invoke Erikson. The only developmental research that is discussed is Harter’s (2015; Harter & Monsour, 1992) research on changes in evaluative traits across adolescence, an approach that is consistent with the social psychological study of the self.

To be sure, developmental research has been relatively insular as well, and there are subdivisions within the developmental approach to identity that have mostly failed to adequately interface with one another (i.e., the identity status and narrative approaches; see Syed, 2012; McLean & Syed, 2015). However, some developmental research, namely in the area of ethnic/racial identity, has explicitly sought to merge the social psychological and developmental perspectives (Phinney, 1990; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014; Verkuyten, 2016; Yip & Douglass, 2013).

Despite these many different terms, and identical terms defined in different ways, all uses of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Self, Motivation, and Virtue, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deep Integration
• 2 Expansive Interdisciplinarity and the Moral Self
• 3 The Virtues of Interdisciplinary Research: Psychological and Philosophical Inquiry Into Self, Motivation, and Virtue
• 4 Virtue and Self-Distancing
• 5 Admiring Moral Exemplars: Sketch of an Ethical Sub-Discipline
• 6 Achieving Deep Integration Across Disciplines: A Process Lens on Investigating Human Flourishing
• 7 Toward an Integrated Psychology and Philosophy of Good Life Stories
• 8 Reflections on Our Sociological-Philosophical Study of the Self, Motivation, and Virtue Among LGBTI Conservative Christians and Their Allies
• 9 Integrating “Cultures of Reasoning”: Interdisciplinary Research on Motivating the Self to Wisdom and Virtue
• List of Contributors
• Index