>>Linda Zagzebski: In recent years psychologists have been developing techniques to measure
virtue. This is important for a number of reasons. If you are a parent or an educator,
you want to know what methods of moral training work, but you can’t find out what works
without having a way to tell when you have been successful. If you are taking this course,
you may want to know the answers to some of the theoretical questions we have discussed.
For instance, whether there is a connection between being virtuous and being successful
in college or in life. I mentioned in an earlier lecture that there is evidence that self-control
and perseverance are positively correlated with getting good grades and graduating, but
how can we know that without a way to measure self-control and perseverance? In the last
lecture I mentioned the skepticism of some philosophers about the existence of virtues.
They ask, if hardly anybody is virtuous, why talk about it? But obviously we can’t find
out how many people are virtuous without a way to measure it. In a lecture several weeks
ago I defined a virtue as a deep and enduring acquired excellence that includes: a motive
disposition characteristic of the virtue, behavior that arises from that motive, and
reliable success in reaching the end of the motive. For example, a person with the virtue
of compassion has a disposition to feel sorry for suffering people, and that characteristically
motivates her to act to alleviate their suffering, and I proposed that if she has the full virtue
of compassion, she is reliably successful at doing so. We discussed the issue of whether
success is necessary to virtue. But whether or not succeeding at alleviating suffering
is necessary for the virtue of compassion, trying to do so is necessary, so compassion
is not just a pattern of behavior. It includes a disposition to have certain emotions and
aims. The compassionate person will notice that a person is suffering, she will then
have a feeling we call compassion for that person, and that feeling will motivate her
to try to remove the suffering. But how can we measure all of that? We can see a person’s
behavior but it’s very hard to look into her mind to see what she sees and how she
feels about it and what she is trying to accomplish. Psychologists have developed a number of instruments
for measuring virtue using questionnaires and crosschecking the responses by interviewing
a person’s friends. These measures require self-awareness and truthfulness on the part
of the subject and insight on the part of their friends. People may exaggerate their
good side, but sometimes it is the opposite because of the problem of reference bias.
Reference bias occurs when people compare themselves to the members of a particular
group. For instance, if I ask you how good you are at math, your answer will depend upon
the group you are comparing yourself with. If you compare yourself with people who are
exceptionally good at math, you will rate yourself lower than if you compare yourself
with people in the general population. Most of whom you don’t know so you don’t know
how to make the comparison. The same thing can happen in self-assessments of virtue.
When people become aware of exceptionally virtuous persons, they tend to rate themselves
lower in virtue than they did before. It does not mean they are any worse than they were
before. It just means their standards have gone up. An interesting new method that can
be applied to the measurement of virtue is the EAR- an electronically activated recorder,
which was developed by the psychologist Matthias Mehl and his associates. This micro recording
device tracks people’s verbal behavior and interactions with others over a period of
time. Participants wear the EAR while going about their normal lives, and they usually
forget they are wearing it. I am told that it typically records about 70 samples of a
person’s acoustic environment per day. This permits the researcher to get quite a large
amount of observational data about the subject from the point of view of a hidden bystander,
including the kind of subtle interactions with the other persons that cannot be obtained
by ordinary empirical methods. We hear the subject’s words and tone of voice and the
sounds made by people in the environment, but we still have to interpret the motive
and the contextual cues that we cannot see. The researchers use this method to supplement
self-report data and to test for temporal stability in character traits. The participant’s
behavior has to be coded as expressing a trait of a certain kind. For instance, one example
of the data to be interpreted is complaining. It’s usually easy to tell when someone is
complaining, but it takes interpretation to code it as a good thing or a bad thing. Suppose
the subject says, “You blankety blank. You were supposed to meet me 45 minutes ago.”
That’s complaining, but suppose the subject missed an appointment or needs to get to the
airport. Personally I think the complaint might be justified. But my point here is not
about examples of complaining, but that the data has to be interpreted to permit the researcher
to identify it as an indication of a trait of a certain kind. A completely different
kind of empirical study is the use of FMRI technology while the participants engage in
games of giving or rescuing. For a number of years I have been a consultant for a research
group at Cal Tech led by Michael Spezio. This group has undertaken a series of studies on
exemplars. One involves neuroimaging of people while they are playing a game in which they
have to decide whether to give the money to aid another person whose money has been stolen.
They compare the brains of the people who rescue with those who do not. Recently they
have had real life exemplars play the same game and have done neuroimaging of them as
well. These measures are intended to tell us which areas of the brain are active when
certain kinds of decisions are made, and whether there is consistency in giving and rescuing
in real life situations and in laboratory situations. There are lots of other new ways
to measure virtue that have been proposed. I know of some novel ideas that are in development,
and I will tell you what I find out if some of these ideas are implemented. Collaboration
between philosophers and empirical scientists on the study of virtue is still in its early
stages. Philosophers often make claims about what virtuous people are like and how we can
learn virtue, but we need to know if what we say can be empirically confirmed. Likewise,
empirical scientists sometimes think they are measuring the same thing the philosophers
are talking about, but maybe they aren’t. Learning each other’s methods and vocabulary
is important. I will give you links to some ongoing studies on virtue that involve extensive
cooperation between philosophers and scientists. Nancy Snow, the leader of one of these groups,
is now at OU directing the new institute for the Study of Human Flourishing.