Personality and Morality: The Ethical Implications Of Personality

Introduction

The continuous development in our understanding of personality presents an excellent opportunity for the reevaluation of the relationship between personality and morality. Psychologists have always, to a degree, concerned themselves with the moral implications of their findings. However, with the emergence of complex, empirically verified frameworks for constructs like personality, the opportunity to do so is more present than ever. This investigation will seize that opportunity by utilizing the traditions of moral psychology, depth psychology, virtue ethics, and modern personality science. When attempting to identify the nature of a deep psychological construct like personality, it quickly becomes clear that many approaches have been taken throughout human history. Also, in the case of personality, related concepts such as character are often easily conflated with it. One of the goals of this investigation will be to explicate the difference between personality and character. Then, once it is understood the distinct role that personality plays in decision making, perception, relationships, and ethical orientation in life, the final goal will be to identify how personality impacts moral life.

History of Personality

When attempting to lay out the dynamic interaction between personality and the landscape of ethics, one first must understand the general history of personality as a construct. Personality as an abstract idea, like so many others, has its genesis in ancient times. We make the mistake of assuming the ancients didn’t have a concept of personality, because they lacked an advanced field of psychology. We often relegate their psychological works to the area of philosophy. [1] Regardless of what we classify their works as; they were circling the same construct that we now refer to as personality. The great pre-Socratic philosopher Hippocrates “postulated that the features of temperament were related to the physical humors of the body: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm” suggesting their interconnection with four temperaments “sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic”[2] With our modern understanding of psychology and physiology, we would write this ancient theory off as terribly mistaken. However, we still believe in a physiological basis for personality, and our ability to pinpoint that basis is still significantly insufficient. Further philosophers, such as Plato, pointed out that there are innate differences in our natures, a core idea of modern-day personality research. He points this out in The Republic when establishing the division of labors, “we are not all born alike. On the contrary, each of us differs somewhat in nature from the others, one being suited to one job, another to another.”[3] While we did not get a modern-day equivalent of a rigorous and empirical approach to personality from the ancients, they were by no means oblivious to the idea that different individuals have unique temperaments and psychological abilities.

The origins of our modern conception of personality calls upon the name of Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), cousin of Charles Darwin. He was not only interested in personality differences between individuals, but he also developed a methodology for measuring those differences. He used questionnaires, tests, and a statistical method for assessing the association between different sets of data.[4] This is the same kind of methodology that is used in our modern-day personality research. After Galton, the major personality theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were largely clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler.[5] Jung’s framework for personality traits will be discussed in greater length later in this paper, because it led to the creation of one of the most popular modern day personality models. As early as 1930’s, the five-factor model, our most well verified modern personality framework, began to emerge. After decades of further development of this model, it can be confidently said that it is our strongest personality framework to date. A plethora of different researchers have contributed to the development of this approach to personality, and the five-factor model will be our primary tool for unveiling the moral implications of personality.

Big 5 Personality Traits

As alluded to, there are two personality frameworks we will explore, beginning with the Five Factor Model, also known as the Big Five personality traits. This is the most empirically verified, widely supported model within the psychological community, and it was created using widely accepted psychometric techniques. The model asserts that “individuals can be characterized in terms of relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions”[6] It consists of five factors labeled Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.[7] These five factors or traits are universal among all people, but everyone can be given a percentile score for each factor. The percentile score indicates where they fall along each dimension of personality in relation to the rest of the population. The five dimensions are the highest resolution aspects of personality that modern psychology has been able to identify. Also, according to the model, personality traits are endogenous and highly stable across time in cognitively intact individuals.[8] This is not to deny that personality is a highly dynamic construct which experiences changes throughout the lifetime of an individual, but it is to point out the robust stability of personality across time. Now, let’s look at the characteristics of each personality dimension. The openness factor is associated with imagination, insight, and cognitive exploration. Extraversion is associated with behavioral exploration, sociability, and the likelihood of directing energy towards people and activities. Conscientiousness is associated with achievement striving, self-discipline, and orderliness. Neuroticism is associated with emotional instability, anxiety, and the overall tendency to experience negative emotion. Agreeableness is associated with compassion, cooperation, empathy, and the tendency to be warm or kind. As stated, everyone can be given a percentile score in relation to the general population for each dimension of personality. For example, one individual might score tenth percentile in agreeableness, meaning they are less agreeable than 90% of the population. The Big Five model is inherently relational in this sense.

MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)

The second personality framework worth looking at is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It has a questionable standing within the psychological community but is still widely popular for self-discovery. This model of personality stems from Carl Jung’s personality typology. The MBTI is designed to determine personality structure by identifying respondents’ answers in four opposite pairs known as “dichotomies”.[9] The dichotomies are Extraversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving.[10] These constructs, minus Judging-Perceiving, added by the creators of the MBTI, are the same constructs that Carl Jung identified in his work Psychological Types. Extraversion-Introversion is of course also a dimension of the Big 5 Model, albeit with a different interpretation of exactly what it means as a personality factor. There are many correlations between the MBTI and the Big 5. The intuition dimension has a high correlation with the openness factor of the Big 5.[11] Feeling has a substantial correlation with the agreeableness factor of the Big 5, and Judging has a strong correlation with the conscientiousness factor of the Big 5. [12] So, while the Myers-Briggs framework has been largely rejected within the modern psychological community, it cannot be denied that there is evidence of correlation with the Big 5. However, since the Big 5 is the most well supported, we will use it as the main personality model for the rest of this investigation.

Virtue Ethics

Now that the rough nature of this approach to personality has been laid out, it is useful to see how it relates to virtue ethics, which will take us one step closer to the moral implications of personality. Virtue ethics as anyone might expect, is primarily concerned with virtues. A virtue can be defined as an excellent trait of character.[13] Quite immediately, a similarity between the terminology used for personality and virtue is clear. Virtues and personality constructs can both be described as traits assigned to the person possessing them. These kinds of traits are much different in nature than physical traits and are something like a disposition which goes deep down into the possessor.[14] Both virtues and personality traits are powerful, durable, and have a large impact on behavior. This is what differentiates a trait from what virtue ethicists call “habits” and personality researchers call “characteristic adaptations”.[15] For example, an individual possessing the virtue of honesty is likely to also have the habit of truth-telling in their interactions with others. In fact, when it comes to virtues, it could be argued that the habit is a pre-condition for the possession of the virtue. Habit and virtue are deeply interconnected in this way. It is the same with personality. Someone high in extraversion is likely to develop the characteristic adaptations of frequent socializing and involvement in group activities. An individual that doesn’t engage in any of the characteristic adaptations associated with extraversion is very unlikely to score high in extraversion unless they happen to be completely isolated. With such similarity between the constructs of personality and character, it is very easy to conflate the two. However, while they are similar in nature, there is an important difference between personality traits and virtues. The important difference, as argued by the great philosopher Aristotle is that “Virtue of character results from habit” and “none of the virtues of character arises in us naturally.”[16] Virtue and character must be cultivated. They’re not something we’re born with. Personality is of a different nature. As pointed out earlier, within the Big 5 Model, personality traits are endogenous, determined largely from birth.[17] It would be a grim existence if our moral character was determined from birth and would fly in the face of our concept of free will and our ability to choose between right and wrong. Personality does not present that problem. For example, being high in trait extraversion does not indicate a moral standing, unlike possessing the virtue of honesty does. Virtue and character are inherently imbued with a moral essence. When we say someone has poor character, we do not mean that they have a poor personality structure. So, while there are similarities between character and personality, they are inherently different in nature. They are not to be conflated.

Narrative and Storytelling

One of the most interesting places personality can be analyzed is in narrative and storytelling. This may be the single most enlightening place to look while exploring the relationship between personality and morality. Myth, narrative, and storytelling have of course been fundamental to human society for all recorded history. They’re fundamental not just as a form of entertainment, but because they express the patterns of behavior that make up our world. This topic of inquiry was primary to Jordan Peterson’s book Maps of Meaning in which he wrote, “The capacity to abstract, to code morality in image and word, has facilitated the communication, comprehension and development of behavior and behavioral interaction.”[18] This capacity to abstract morality in image and word is core to our religious and philosophical traditions. The ancient philosophers that we so admire used story and thought experiment as an indispensable tool for the discovery of truth. The greatest narratives of all time such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad & The Odyssey contain the same patterns of moral behavior that are still used today in the films that capture the imagination of so many worldwide. Morality and personality are central to all stories. They shape the moral meaning of each narrative. The question, “What is the moral of the story?”, can rarely be answered without an intuitive understanding of the nature of the characters of the story. This intuitive understanding of the characters comes from perceiving their disposition through their actions and the way they see the world. Characters experience different callings, find different friends, and struggle with different adversaries. Stories are a place where patterns of personality manifest, just like the “real” world.

Collective Unconscious

Another pertinent idea is Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” which he identified as a part of the psyche that has “contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.”[19] It is identical in all men and helps explain why we can so readily understand stories and why we dream in them. The concept of the collective unconscious is thought to be a somewhat mystical theory of the psyche, much like Freud’s concept of the unconscious. However, the idea of the unconscious is well supported in the psychological community and quite intuitive once one understands it. The leap from belief in the unconscious mind to the collective unconscious is not so great. It is difficult to deny that there must be some psychic structure that contains information regarding the patterns of images, symbols, and behavior which are the components of any story. No one must explicitly teach a child how to experience a story or understand a character. Stories inherently resonate with us, not long after birth. Jung adds to his theory of the collective unconscious the idea of “archetypes” which are the contents of the collective unconscious.[20] “The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.”[21] This is arguably what writers are doing when they create a story world. They’re drawing from the collective unconscious and translating unconscious archetypes into conscious form. Archetypes can be manifested both as people and objects. When we see archetypes represented in a story, they take on meaning associated with the deep pattern they represent. For example, the Great Mother is one of the most fundamental archetypes.[22] We see the Great Mother appear across many great stories, along with her shadow, the Evil Mother. When we see a representation of the Great Mother appear in a narrative, we unconsciously understand the significance of the figure. Each archetype tends to be represented through patterns of moral behavior and personality. It’s possible to see a similar personality structure be used for the representation of different archetypes; however, representations of the same archetype tend to have similar personality structures. Oftentimes the villain of a story possesses a similar personality to the hero of the story, but in its dark form. This is because, according to Jung, the villain represents the shadow of the hero archetype. Therefore, the hero and villain have similar personalities but completely different moral orientations. This contrast makes the dynamic between hero and villain deeply captivating. A great, widely known modern example is that of Batman and the Joker. Batman is a representation of the hero archetype and Joker the villain archetype. If we do a rough Big 5 personality analysis of the two characters, we find that they are both high in openness, low in agreeableness, and low in neuroticism. Where they truly differ is in their moral orientation. Batman upholds an ethic of non-killing and self-sacrifice for the good of the city. Joker on the other hand is violent, sadistic, and doesn’t engage in meaningful self-sacrifice. He is a representation of the dark form of the trickster archetype, which often possesses a certain personality structure, but is not destined for good or evil. If you look across each archetype you find that there are almost always morally good and morally evil representations, with similar personality structures. This is further evidence that personality does not leave you destined to a particular virtue of character, but as I will argue shortly, it does have moral implications.

Implications on Ethics

Personality structure, as has been shown, does not ultimately determine your character or moral behavior. However, it dynamically interacts with your character and moral behavior. This becomes very clear once you begin to flesh out the influence of personality on behavior. For the final analysis of personality and its relation to morality, it makes sense to consider some examples using the Big 5 Model. Trait agreeableness appears to be one of the dimensions that would be most likely to influence a person’s virtue, because agreeableness is associated with compassion, empathy, and cooperation. Someone low in this dimension would be less likely to cooperate and consider the feeling of others in their actions. However, scoring low in agreeableness does not determine moral standing but does present a particular moral dilemma. A person low in agreeableness, to engage in virtuous action, must cultivate habits to deal with the fact that they are inherently less likely to empathize and agree with others. For them, a common moral calling might be to go against the group in ways that are beneficial for others. To draw on a fictional example from earlier we can revisit the fictional character of Batman, who is very low in agreeableness. He is depicted as cold, calculated, and not concerned with the feelings of others. However, he channels this personality factor into morally good actions such as combating crime in the city and intervening when the group falls into the hands of a villain. This is the superpower of the person low in agreeableness. They have the natural ability to go against the feelings of the group when the group is misguided or being deceived. They may have a less compassionate nature, but they can use that for the good of others if channeled properly. Take on the other hand the person high in agreeableness. They are inherently more oriented towards group cooperation which involves surveying the feelings of others and adjusting behavior accordingly. As good as this trait sounds, it presents a different moral dilemma. What if the group is headed in a pathological direction? What if the people they are empathizing with are engaged in vice and misguided behavior? The individual high in agreeableness risks being taken advantage of by bad actors or caring too much about the feelings of someone that doesn’t deserve to be empathized with. There is a dark side to each end of the personality dimensions. We can take the dimension of neuroticism as another example. Individuals high in neuroticism experience more anxiety, negative emotions, and are more sensitive to threats. The dark side to this is these individuals have a higher propensity for falling into depression, thinking about catastrophic outcomes, and stressing themselves and others. The light side is that if there is a genuine threat at hand, or a serious problem, they are often the first ones to notice. They can use this ability to protect those around them from danger. The person low in neuroticism might remain calmer and less affected by anxiety but fail to identify a genuine threat when it appears. Neuroticism is another case of the appearance of moral dilemmas on both sides of the spectrum. Openness is another very interesting element of personality with great moral implications. Those low in openness tend to engage in less abstract exploration and intellectual activity. We refer to these people as closed off and less open to new ideas. This can be great when things are already working well or if they have put themselves in a societal role that does not require this kind of exploration. However, if things need to be changed, this person may struggle to take the proper action. Part of their moral journey requires them to learn when to let go and imagine or to help the person who knows how to step in. On the other side of the dimension, the high openness individual risks getting lost in new ideas and abstractions. A great depiction of this is in the movie A Beautiful Mind where the main character John Nash, a high openness mathematician, gets lost in a fantasy world, to the great detriment of his wife and child. The moral calling for his character is to learn how to ground himself in reality, as much as he is constantly pulled to become completely lost in abstract patterns of possibility. This is a problem that the great philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, and various creatives all must deal with. High openness is both a superpower and a curse. The extraversion factor presents even more great examples. Those high in extraversion tend to be more sociable and motivated by extrinsic rewards. This sounds great at face value, but the theme continues. Extraverts can more easily lose themselves in the external world of action and reward. They can neglect reflection, solitude, and the benefits that come from stepping away from the world of constant activity. They might attach too much of themselves to institutions, to other people, and to the pursuit of social status or monetary reward. Part of their moral calling is to find a way to engage with the things that do not offer social reward or immediate behavioral feedback. If they fail to do this, they become the archetypal representation of the person lost in their own reflection. This kind of person only values actions which are reflected by some sort of outside source, whether it be a source of social feedback or physical feedback from the environment. For this reason, there is a very strong correlation between narcissism and extraversion.[23] The introvert has a different moral calling. They are called to engage more with the group, with the social realm, and with external reward. If they don’t, they have the propensity to become a recluse; a demotivated person who sees all the healthy reward-oriented behaviors of others as pointless. Conscientiousness is more of the same! The individual high in trait conscientiousness is naturally more organized, diligent, disciplined, and likely to uphold their goals and take necessary steps towards them. The dark side of this is too much rigidity and exclusion of any activity that doesn’t immediately relate to their goals. This is well represented in the tyrannical, mechanized state, with its relentless goal-oriented activity. The person low in conscientiousness faces the exact opposite problem. They tend to gravitate towards too little structure, too little order, and too little discipline. If they do not take the proper moral actions, they fall into chaos, never get anything done, or worse, destroy the very stable structures they rely on. This is the temptation of the trickster. We all know people on both ends of the spectrum. We all have the friend or family member that struggles to keep order in life and reach their goals. We also know the overly rigid person that doesn’t see the point if there is no clear goal being pursued. This kind of analysis only gets more complex if we start to consider not just one trait at a time but all five dimensions making up a total personality. Each character in a story is a total personality with a unique moral calling across their unique experiences. Personality interacts with character and context to create the endlessly dynamic patterns of moral representation that we see in our daily life and in narratives. Every person we interact with has a personality structure, some more rare than others, but still sharing in all the major dimensions.

Conclusion

This thorough investigation has shown the relevance of personality in relation to morality and virtue. Personality trait structure is one of the primary determinants of an individual’s behavior and the moral callings they confront in life. One of the many purposes of storytelling is to capture these dynamic interactions between personality and all the elements that make up the world. The moral implications of personality structure are endless and always playing out in the background of our daily lives. So much of the occupations people choose, the temptations they face, and the ways they perceive the world can be explained, in part, through personality dimensions. As our understanding of the deep nature of personality continues to increase, only more insights in relation to morality will become available. I believe that enriching our understanding of personality will help us strengthen the tradition of moral psychology and moral philosophy. Without an understanding of these deep patterns of individual behavior, it can be hard to consciously articulate the importance of story, myth, and narrative in our analysis of morality. On the other hand, with the conscious understanding of the patterns and dimensions that influence our behavior, articulating the utmost importance of narrative becomes quite possible. If nothing else, this analysis has shown that personality and morality are inextricably linked in a highly dynamic interplay that anyone with the curiosity to uncover may do so. No personality structure condemns someone to a certain character but presents them with a unique array of moral realities. This is the beginning of the relationship between personality and morality.

Bibliography

Dumont, Frank. A History of Personality Psychology: Theory, Science, and Research from Hellenism to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Plato. Republic. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

Pervin, Lawrence A., and Oliver P. John, eds. Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.

McCrae, Robert R., and Paul T. Costa, Jr. “Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model of Personality.” Journal of Personality 60, no. 2 (1992): 17–40.

Hursthouse, Rosalind, and Glen Pettigrove. “Virtue Ethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2023 edition, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999.

Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Vol. 9, part 1 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Zajenkowski, Marcin, and Kinga Szymaniak. “Narcissism between Facets and Domains: The Relationships between Two Types of Narcissism and Aspects of the Big Five.” Current Psychology 40, no. 5 (2019): 2112–2121. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-0147-1

Footnotes

[1] Frank Dumont, A History of Personality Psychology: Theory, Science, and Research from Hellenism to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2.

[2] Dumont, History of Personality Psychology, 5.

[3] Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 48 (370a).

[4] Dumont, History of Personality Psychology, 30.

[5] Dumont, History of Personality Psychology, 33

[6] Pervin and John, Handbook of Personality, 140.

[7] Lawrence A. Pervin and Oliver P. John, eds., **Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 139.**

[8] Pervin and John, Handbook of Personality, 145.

[9] King and Mason, “Myers Briggs Type Indicator,” 2.

[10] King and Mason, “Myers Briggs Type Indicator,” 2.

[11] Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa, Jr., “Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model of Personality,” Journal of Personality 60, no. 2 (1992): 30.

[12] McCrae and Costa, “Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs,” 30.

[13] Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2023 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[14] Hursthouse and Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics.”

[15] Pervin and John, Handbook of Personality.

[16] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999), II.1, lines 15–20.

[17] Pervin and John, Handbook of Personality, 145.

[18] Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York: Routledge, 1999), 236.

[19] C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, part 1 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

[20] Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.

[21] Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.

[22] Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.

[23] Marcin Zajenkowski and Kinga Szymaniak, “Narcissism between Facets and Domains: The Relationships between Two Types of Narcissism and Aspects of the Big Five,” Current Psychology 40, no. 5 (2019): 2112–2121, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-0147-1