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The Character Lens: A Person-Centered Perspective on Moral Recognition and Ethical Decision-Making

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Abstract

We introduce the character lens perspective to account for stable patterns in the way that individuals make sense of and construct the ethical choices and situations they face. We propose that the way that individuals make sense of their present experience is an enduring feature of their broader moral character, and that differences between people in ethical decision-making are traceable to upstream differences in the way that people disambiguate and give meaning to their present context. In three studies, we found that individuals with higher standing on moral character (operationalized as a combination of Honesty-Humility, Guilt Proneness, and Moral Identity Centrality) tended to construe their present context in more moral or ethical terms, and this difference in moral recognition accounted for differences in the ethical choices they made. Moreover, individuals with higher levels of moral character maintained high levels of moral recognition even as pressure to ignore moral considerations increased. Accordingly, this work unifies research on moral character, moral recognition, sensemaking, and judgment and decision-making into a person-centered account of ethical decision-making, highlighting the way decision-makers actively and directly shape the choice contexts to which they must respond.

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Notes

  1. In the literature, moral awareness (Jordan, 2009; Reynolds, 2006) refers to an individual’s recognition that a single situation contains moral issues, whereas moral sensitivity (Sparks, 2015; Sparks & Hunt, 1998) refers to a broader recognition of moral issues across multiple situations (Reynolds & Miller, 2015). The terms moral construal (van Bavel et al., 2012) and ethical decision framing (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008) are largely synonymous with the term moral awareness in that they refer to processes whereby the decision-maker codes a decision as being relevant to morality, but unlike the term moral awareness, the terms moral construal and ethical decision framing do not imply a binary distinction between awareness versus unawareness (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008). Moral attentiveness refers to a person’s chronic attention to moral issues in his/her everyday environment, and in defining this construct, Reynolds (2008) uses a lens metaphor. Unlike our theorizing about the character lens, Reynolds does not argue that a person’s moral lens is embedded in their moral character, but rather represents a stand-alone individual difference. Because the process of sensemaking is inherently integrative, our focus is on the holistic operation of moral recognition rather than on disentangling the specific nuanced facets that might comprise it.

  2. This is not to say that moral character influences interpretation of all decisions that individuals face in their daily lives—moral recognition is nonetheless still bounded by “reality constraints” (Kunda, 1990). Though a wide range of decisions can be moralized, at least for some people some of the time (Kreps & Monin, 2011), reality imposes some limits on what people can see in any given situation.

  3. Data collection occurred over the course of two academic years at both universities. The majority of the data (78.4%) were collected using the design described here. The remainder of data (1 year at one of the universities) were collected with fully hypothetical choices. This change did not substantively affect the results.

  4. Among these 281 participants, several had missing values for some items: round 3 moral recognition (n = 3), round 4 moral recognition (n = 2), round 2 internal whistleblowing (n = 2), round 1 external whistleblowing (n = 2), and round 3 external whistleblowing (n = 2). We used data from all 281 participants in our analyses and accounted for missing data by using the full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation method.

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Acknowledgements

This work was made possible by funding provided by the Moral Beacon Project at Wake Forest University and the Templeton Religion Trust to Erik Helzer, Taya Cohen, and Brandy Aven. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors, the US government, or Department of Defense. We thank Brandy Aven, Alessandro Iorio, Kori Krueger, Laurie Weingart, and attendees of the Moral Beacon Project meetings for their help with the development and refinement of this research, as well as Steve Carney and the Center for Behavioral and Decision Research at Carnegie Mellon University for providing research assistance. Portions of this work were presented at the 2018 meeting of the Academy of Management. Study materials and data files for this research are available on the Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/A2YGJ.

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  1. Naval Postgraduate School, 555 Dyer Road, Monterey, CA, 93943, USA

    Erik G. Helzer

  2. Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Taya R. Cohen & Yeonjeong Kim

  3. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yeonjeong Kim

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  1. Erik G. Helzer
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Helzer, E.G., Cohen, T.R. & Kim, Y. The Character Lens: A Person-Centered Perspective on Moral Recognition and Ethical Decision-Making. J Bus Ethics 182, 483–500 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-05010-z

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