Psychological Realism and “Creatures Like Us”
Psychological Realism and “Creatures Like Us”
This chapter surveys research in social, cognitive, moral, and developmental psychology that suggests character is not constituted by global character traits that inform behavior over a wide variety of situations. Instead, traits are much more local and specific, and situations shape behavior at least as much as traits do. Human character appears to be situated and social, resulting in differentiation by sphere; domain-differentiation may be a fundamental feature of moral character. This is the psychology of public reason. As this chapter suggests, domain-differentiation challenges common views of the self as unified around a single set of goals, beliefs, attitudes, and aptitudes. A brief examination of cross-cultural psychology bolsters this view of the self as differentiated by domain.
Keywords: Domain-differentiation, Moral character, situational psychology, Self, Cross-cultural psychology, Traits
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
