engleski

Morality, personality and virtues: A natural-language view

Despite the popularity of the morality construct, we know of no studies on the morality in the natural language. The relation between morality constructs and personality dispositions is also elusive as well as the position of morality in the context of virtues. Following the basic premise of the lexical approach that all significant individual differences are embodied in language (De Raad, 2000) we conducted a psycholexical study of morality in the Croatian language. In the first study, a group of 11 rated how well the 2045 adjectives from the natural language describe morality. The first study yielded 163 morality descriptors in the Croatian language. In the second study, those 163 adjectives were rated for self-descriptions by a large sample of (N = 611) University of Zagreb students and for peer-descriptions by (N = 611) students' best acquaintances. Factor analyses yielded four morality factors from the natural language: Benevolence, Honor, Loyalty and Depravity. Analysis of the relations between those factors and the Big-Five personality factors revealed that Benevolence was strongly related to Big-Five Agreeableness, while Honor correlated mostly with Conscientiousness. Loyalty was negatively related to Extraversion and Intellect, while Depravity had only slight relations with the Big-Five factors. Analysis of the relations between natural language morality factors and Haidt's Morality Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) revealed that three MFQ dimensions were related to the morality factors from the natural language: Care, Fairness and Purity. Analysis of the relations between morality factors in the natural language and Cawley and De Raad's markers of virtues revealed a lot of complexity, depending on the dimension observed and the type of rater (self vs. peer). In conclusion, morality in the natural language has substantial relations with all three observed sets of constructs: "personality proper", Moral Foundations Theory and virtues.

morality; virtues; Big-Five personality model; natural language

nije evidentirano