Abstract
Interdisciplinary virtue theories have conceptualized virtues as contextualized personality traits that may only be expressed in the presence of virtue-relevant situational affordances (Fowers et al., 2023; Wright et al., 2020). However, there have been no systematic efforts to determine which situations create opportunities for virtuous actions and what role these situational affordances should play in the conceptualization and measurement of virtues. Across two crowdsourcing studies and two daily life studies, we developed a taxonomy of virtue- affording situation features, tested competing predictions about how virtue traits and situational affordances work in tandem to explain momentary virtue enactments, and investigated measurement implications of including information about relevant affordances. We found little evidence that people’s virtue enactments were more consistent with their trait levels when these virtue-relevant affordances were present. Instead, we primarily found main effects of affordances on virtue enactments. Additionally, comparisons of intercorrelations between virtue enactments during situations where virtue affordances were present vs. absent suggested that self-reports of virtue states during virtue-relevant situations may be less affected by response biases. In sum, these findings support an additive model of trait and situational effects on virtues and provide insights into potential methods for improving the measurement of virtues in everyday life.
Committee Chair
Jessie Sun
Committee Members
Patrick Hill, Michael Strube
Degree
Master of Arts (AM/MA)
Author's Department
Psychology
Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
Spring 5-12-2025
Language
English (en)
Recommended Citation
Hardin, Benjamin, "Everyday Virtue Expressions as a Function of Virtue Traits and Situational Affordances" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3644.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3644