We present the Motivation, Action, Sacrifice, and Temptation (MAST) view of moral praiseworthiness and evaluate four components shaping judgments of an actor’s morality: (a) How did the person act? (b) Why did the person act? (c) Did the person sacrifice something when acting? and (d) Was the person tempted to avoid the sacrifice? Across multiple moral domains, we evaluate moral impressions of hypothetical actors who acted ostensibly morally under different motivational, sacrificial, and temptational conditions. Across four studies (total N > 1,200) and 150 morally relevant scenarios, all components shaped moral impressions, with motivational purity having the strongest impact. Exploring motivation more deeply via Self-Determination Theory, we found effects of internalized (vs. externalized) motivations. Broadly speaking, judges prefer actors to act automatically and in an idealized manner rather than with deliberation and effort. This work address questions that have fascinated philosophers, psychologists, and laypeople, advancing understanding of moral impression formation.

Background Many people want to build good habits to become healthier, live longer, or become happier but struggle to change their behavior. Gamification can make behavior change easier by awarding points for the desired behavior and deducting points for its omission. Objective In this study, we introduced a principled mathematical method for determining how many points should be awarded or deducted for the enactment or omission of the desired behavior, depending on when and how often the person has succeeded versus failed to enact it in the past. We called this approach optimized gamification of behavior change. Methods As a proof of concept, we designed a chatbot that applies our optimized gamification method to help people build healthy water-drinking habits. We evaluated the effectiveness of this gamified intervention in a 40-day field experiment with 1 experimental group (n=43) that used the chatbot with optimized gamification and 2 active control groups for which the chatbot’s optimized gamification feature was disabled. For the first control group (n=48), all other features were available, including verbal feedback. The second control group (n=51) received no feedback or reminders. We measured the strength of all participants’ water-drinking habits before, during, and after the intervention using the Self-Report Habit Index and by asking participants on how many days of the previous week they enacted the desired habit. In addition, all participants provided daily reports on whether they enacted their water-drinking intention that day. Results A Poisson regression analysis revealed that, during the intervention, users who received feedback based on optimized gamification enacted the desired behavior more often (mean 14.71, SD 6.57 times) than the active (mean 11.64, SD 6.38 times; P<.001; incidence rate ratio=0.80, 95% CI 0.71-0.91) or passive (mean 11.64, SD 5.43 times; P=.001; incidence rate ratio=0.78, 95% CI 0.69-0.89) control groups. The Self-Report Habit Index score significantly increased in all conditions (P<.001 in all cases) but did not differ between the experimental and control conditions (P>.11 in all cases). After the intervention, the experimental group performed the desired behavior as often as the 2 control groups (P≥.17 in all cases). Conclusions Our findings suggest that optimized gamification can be used to make digital behavior change interventions more effective. Trial Registration Open Science Framework (OSF) H7JN8; https://osf.io/h7jn8

Distractions are omnipresent and can derail our attention, which is a precious and very limited resource. To achieve their goals in the face of distractions, people need to regulate their attention, thoughts, and behavior; this is known as self-regulation. How can self-regulation be supported or strengthened in ways that are relevant for everyday work and learning activities? To address this question, we introduce and evaluate a desktop application that helps people stay focused on their work and train self-regulation at the same time. Our application lets the user set a goal for what they want to do during a defined period of focused work at their computer, then gives negative feedback when they get distracted, and positive feedback when they reorient their attention towards their goal. After this so-called focus session, the user receives overall feedback on how well they focused on their goal relative to previous sessions. While existing approaches to attention training often use artificial tasks, our approach transforms real-life challenges into opportunities for building strong attention control skills. Our results indicate that optimal attentional feedback can generate large increases in behavioral focus, task motivation, and self-control—benefitting users to successfully achieve their long-term goals.

Objective: What do people see as distinguishing the morally exceptional from others? To handle the problem that people may disagree about who qualifies as morally exceptional, we asked subjects to select and rate their own examples of morally exceptional, morally average, and immoral people. Method: Subjects rated each selected exemplar on several enablers of moral action and several directions of moral action. By applying the logic underlying stimulus sampling in experimental design, we evaluated perceivers' level of agreement about the characteristics of the morally exceptional, even though perceivers rated different targets. Results: Across three studies, there was strong subjective consensus on who is morally exceptional: those who are empathetic and prone to guilt, those who reflect on moral issues and identify with morality, those who have self-control and actually enact moral behaviors, and those who care about harm, compassion, fairness, and honesty. Deep controversies also existed about the moral directions pursued by those seen as morally exceptional: People evaluated those who pursued similar values and made similar decisions more favorably. Conclusion: Strong consensus suggests characteristics that may push a person to go beyond normal expectations, that the study of moral exceptionality is not overly hindered by disagreement over who is morally exceptional, and that there is some common ground between disagreeing camps.

Background Ecological momentary interventions open up new and exciting possibilities for delivering mental health interventions and conducting research in real-life environments via smartphones. This makes designing psychotherapeutic ecological momentary interventions a promising step toward cost-effective and scalable digital solutions for improving mental health and understanding the effects and mechanisms of psychotherapy. Objective The first objective of this study was to formatively assess and improve the usability and efficacy of a gamified mobile app, the InsightApp, for helping people learn some of the metacognitive skills taught in cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and mindfulness-based interventions. The app aims to help people constructively cope with stressful situations and difficult emotions in everyday life. The second objective of this study was to test the feasibility of using the InsightApp as a research tool for investigating the efficacy of psychological interventions and their underlying mechanisms. Methods We conducted 2 experiments. In experiment 1 (n=65; completion rate: 63/65, 97%), participants (mean age 27, SD 14.9; range 19-55 years; 41/60, 68% female) completed a single session with the InsightApp. The intervention effects on affect, belief endorsement, and propensity for action were measured immediately before and after the intervention. Experiment 2 (n=200; completion rate: 142/200, 71%) assessed the feasibility of conducting a randomized controlled trial using the InsightApp. We randomly assigned participants to an experimental or a control condition, and they interacted with the InsightApp for 2 weeks (mean age 37, SD 12.16; range 20-78 years; 78/142, 55% female). Experiment 2 included all the outcome measures of experiment 1 except for the self-reported propensity to engage in predefined adaptive and maladaptive behaviors. Both experiments included user experience surveys. Results In experiment 1, a single session with the app seemed to decrease participants’ emotional struggle, the intensity of their negative emotions, their endorsement of negative beliefs, and their self-reported propensity to engage in maladaptive coping behaviors (P<.001 in all cases; average effect size=−0.82). Conversely, participants’ endorsement of adaptive beliefs and their self-reported propensity to act in accordance with their values significantly increased (P<.001 in all cases; average effect size=0.48). Experiment 2 replicated the findings of experiment 1 (P<.001 in all cases; average effect size=0.55). Moreover, experiment 2 identified a critical obstacle to conducting a randomized controlled trial (ie, asymmetric attrition) and how it might be overcome. User experience surveys suggested that the app’s design is suitable for helping people apply psychotherapeutic techniques to cope with everyday stress and anxiety. User feedback provided valuable information on how to further improve app usability. Conclusions In this study, we tested the first prototype of the InsightApp. Our encouraging preliminary results show that it is worthwhile to continue developing the InsightApp and further evaluate it in a randomized controlled trial.

Many people want to build good habits to become healthier, live longer, or become happier but struggle to change their behavior. Gamification can make behavior change easier by awarding points for the desired behavior and deducting points for its omission. Here, we introduce a principled mathematical method for determining how many points should be awarded/deducted for the enactment/omission of the desired behavior depending on when and how often the person has succeeded versus failed to enact it in the past. We call this approach optimal gamification of behavior change. As a proof of concept, we design a chatbot that applies our optimal gamification method to help people build a healthy water drinking habit. We evaluated the effectiveness of this gamified intervention in a 40-day long field experiment with two control groups that used the same chatbot without points and without feedback and reminders, respectively. We found that, during the intervention, users who received feedback based on optimal gamification enacted the desired behavior more often than the active control group or the passive control group. After the intervention the experimental group enacted the desired behavior just as often as the two control groups. Our findings suggest that optimal gamification can be used to make digital behavior change interventions more effective.

Although moral character may be the most central and consequential facet of one's personality, existing measures are few and suffer from shortcomings. We present the Moral Character Questionnaire (MCQ) to focus primarily on global moral character and secondarily on six moral domains - Honesty, Compassion, Fairness, Loyalty, Respect, and Purity. All subscales assess core components of personality dispositions, including behavior, motivation, cognition, and identity. Across 14 samples and >13,000 participants, MCQ subscales are generally unidimensional, have good-to-strong reliability, and are temporally stable. Based upon hypotheses regarding 21 criterion measures, analyses reveal strong convergent/discriminant validity. Finally, we found connections between the MCQ scales and core personality traits. The MCQ is an efficient and psychometrically strong measure grounded in contemporary personality theory.

People's intentional pursuit of prosocial goals and values (i.e., well-doing) is critical to the flourishing of humanity in the long run. Understanding and promoting well-doing is a shared goal across many fields inside and outside of social and personality psychology. Several of these fields are (partially) disconnected from each other and could benefit from more integration of existing knowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cross-fertilization. To foster the transfer and integration of knowledge across these different fields, we provide a brief overview with pointers to some key articles from each field, highlight connections, and introduce an integrative model of the psychological mechanisms of well-doing. We identify some gaps in the current understanding of well-doing, such as the paucity of research on well-doing with large and long-lasting positive consequences. Building on this analysis, we identify opportunities for high-impact research on well-doing in social and personality psychology, such as understanding and promoting the effective pursuit of highly impactful altruistic goals.

How motivated a person is to pursue a goal may depend on many different properties of the goal, such as how specific it is, how important it is to the person, and how actionable it is. Rigorously measuring all of the relevant goal characteristics is still very difficult. Existing measures are scattered across multiple research fields. Some goal characteristics are not yet covered, while others have been measured under ambiguous terminology. Other conceptually related characteristics have yet to be adapted to goals. Last but not least, the validity of most measures of goal characteristics has yet to be assessed. The aim of this study is to: a) integrate, refine, and extend previous measures into a more comprehensive battery of self-report measures, the Goal Characteristics Questionnaire (GCQ; https://osf.io/3gxk5/?view_only=1ff0e62127c64b82862a0fe7d73c4faf), and b) investigate its evidence of validity. In two empirical studies, this paper provides evidence for the validity of the measures regarding their internal structure, measurement invariance, and convergence and divergence with other relevant goal-related measures, such as the motivation, affect, and the dimensions of Personal Project Analysis. The results show that our goal characteristic dimensions have incremental validity for explaining important outcomes, such as goal commitment and well-being. It concludes with practical recommendations for using the GCQ in research on goal-setting and goal-pursuit, and a discussion about directions for future studies

The purpose of this chapter is to (i) review and to organize the individual differences that have been explicitly proposed to explain or describe individual differences in moral behavior, (ii) review the work on dynamics of those individual differences, and (iii) consider the value of the morally exceptional for elucidating such dynamics. Many constructs have been proposed to explain or describe individual differences in moral behavior, but they are scattered across disparate literatures and do not sufficiently inform each other. Organizing these individual differences will bring the various literatures into communication with each other, facilitating work on the dynamic processes underlying such individual differences. We propose that the existing individual differences for explaining or describing moral behavior fall into six distinct categories. These six categories include perception of moral relevance, judgment of correct behavior, affective prompts and inhibitors, identification with morality or others, moral courage and follow-through, and enacted morality. These categories roughly correspond to differing psychological capacities and differing psychological steps in the process of moral behavior. There has been little research on the dynamics underlying these characteristics, but the research that does exist provides great hope that studying the dynamics of these characteristics will produce fascinating discoveries. We believe that studying the morally exceptional will accelerate such discoveries because they reveal a higher concentration of moral processes.

Do people really have a psychological need to be moral? We present results from an experience sampling study of momentary moral need satisfaction, moral behaviors, and psychological thriving, which also provided an opportunity to test whether the moral need functions differently in people of high vs. low moral character. Results were that moral need satisfaction correlated with psychological thriving cross-sectionally and concurrently in everyday life as much as, and in some cases more than, the other psychological needs recognized as basic in self-determination theory. Further, of all the needs, moral need satisfaction was most tightly linked to moral behavior, demonstrating the specificity of content for the need. Based on these and previous results on the moral need, we present a theoretical analysis of morality as a basic psychological need against the criteria recently outlined by Ryan and Deci (in: Ryan, Deci (eds), Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness, Guilford Publishing, New York, 2017) and by which researchers measure the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In summary, the present research provides empirical evidence to add depth and breadth to the case for morality as an entrant to the list of basic psychological needs.

We used a new methodology for assessing change motivation (Hudson and Fraley 2015 , 2016 ) to test the hypothesis that striving to improve one’s hedonic well-being fails in its aim, whereas striving to improve one’s eudaimonic functioning succeeds. In three studies, participant goals to increase subjective well-being (SWB) were negatively correlated with concurrent SWB, whereas goals to increase relative intrinsic versus extrinsic value orientation (RIEVO) were positively correlated with concurrent RIEVO. In Study 3’s longitudinal investigation, Time 1 RIEVO change goals predicted increased RIEVO six and 12 weeks later, whereas Time 1 SWB change goals did not affect longitudinal SWB. Together, the data support the Aristotelian idea that people should pursue eudaimonia rather than happiness, not least because the latter pursuit may not be as effective.

Two research objectives underlay the present research. First, we tested how frustrated psychological needs caused by the refugee-influx influence the endorsement and selection of refugee-relevant information. Second, we tested how information selection processes contribute to the development of exclusionary attitudes that counteract the integration of refugees into host countries. In a laboratory study (n = 181), frustrated psychological needs decreased participants' endorsement of a refugee-friendly essay (vs. a control essay). Additionally, frustrated needs led to a biased selection of refugee-hostile over refugee-friendly information and such selection biases, in turn, predicted higher levels of ingroup defense and prejudice toward refugees. The findings imply that host societies' receptiveness to refugees is influenced by the maintenance of basic psychological needs.

Ethics education is a requirement in undergraduate engineering education, but evidence suggests that there is a limited improvement, and perhaps even diminishment, in moral commitments and capacities in engineering students during college. In the present paper, we gauge the current state of ethics education and identify opportunities for improvement given current trends in teaching ethics in engineering. We find that engineering ethics education has a number of suboptimal characteristics. First, engineering ethics does not show clear links to varying ethical theories that might inform ethical reasoning and decision making. Second, engineering ethics education places a heavy emphasis on compliance or rule-following, which provides fewer opportunities for internalizing moral values and virtues. Third, ethics lessons often emphasize case studies of rare or extreme circumstances, like the NASA space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, reinforcing the perception that morality is an infrequent professional concern. In the interest of improving ethics education, we introduce character education as a valuable approach to undergraduate engineering ethics education, one grounded in philosophical and psychological work on developing virtuous dispositions as well as personal, professional, and societal flourishing. We describe what character education in engineering might look like and sketch how it could help the profession and its stakeholders achieve both personal and professional outcomes.

We investigate the long-standing yet understudied assumption that feeling moral is a basic psychological need, perhaps like the needs to feel autonomous, competent, and related (ACR). We report an empirical “entrance exam” on whether morality should be considered a need. Specifically, we applied to morality a pioneering method from which Sheldon and colleagues provided evidence that ACR are basic psychological needs. In two studies and four samples, participants recalled events in which they felt un/satisfied, meaningful, pleasurable, at their best, and at their worst. They rated how much candidate psychological needs were satisfied during them. Morality was frequently as or more satisfied than ACR during peak events. Further, it was positively related to indices of positive functioning. These findings suggest feelings of being moral may help people identify times when life is going well. Further, they suggest that morality may be a fundamental psychological need and warrants further investigation.

Healthy democracies require civic engagement (e.g., voting) from their citizens. Past research has suggested that civic engagement is positively associated with self-transcendence values of care and concern for the welfare of others, and negatively associated with self-enhancement values of self-interest, dominance, and personal success. However, research has yet to address whether people's perceptions of others' values are related to civic engagement. Across three studies with nationally representative samples in the UK and US (Ns ≥ 1,000), we explored how civic engagement relates to (a) perceptions of national values, (b) perceptions of the values of one's typical compatriot, and (c) perceptions of the values encouraged by social and cultural institutions. Study 1 showed that the tendency for British citizens to perceive British culture as valuing self-transcendence was associated with an increased likelihood of voting in the 2015 general election. These findings were replicated for “a typical British person” (Study 2) and “a typical American person” (Study 3); Studies 2 and 3 also found that perceived self-enhancement values of typical compatriots were negatively correlated with reported voting. We also examined how perceptions of others' values relate to cultural estrangement—the feeling of not fitting in one's culture or of being atypical. Like civic engagement, those who perceived less self-transcendence and more self-enhancement in their culture felt more culturally estranged. Mediation analyses in Studies 2 and 3 revealed that estrangement helped to explain the relationship between perceptions of others' values and voting. In sum, the extent to which Brits and Americans perceive that self-transcendence values are strongly held by other citizens is associated with feeling less estranged and with reports of being more civically engaged. In contrast, the perception that these targets hold or promote self-enhancement values is positively associated with feelings of estrangement, to the detriment of civic engagement. Implications for future research and democratic processes are discussed.

We studied how people "cross the Rubicon" when making personal goal selections. In Studies 1 and 2 participants rated the self-concordance of four candidate goals, two with intrinsic and two with extrinsic content, before selecting two goals to actually pursue. Intrinsic goal content predicted higher self-concordance, as did matching between goal content and participant values and motives. Self-concordance in turn explained participants' actual goal-selections. In longitudinal Study 2, intrinsic goal selection predicted increased well-being. In experimental Study 3, participants randomly assigned to rate candidate goals prior to selection made more intrinsic selections on average, compared to those not afforded this opportunity. We conclude that considering one's motivations for various candidate goals prior to selecting among them can improve one's goal choices. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We explore and explicate some promising points of integration between self-determination theory (SDT) and whole trait theory (WTT). Integrating SDT and WTT can offer an example for navigating challenges that have long confronted integrating trait-descriptive and motivational-explanatory views of personality. We review SDT and WTT in turn. The review of SDT is organized around the emergence of its six mini-theories. The review of WTT will introduce the descriptive and explanatory elements as aspects of whole traits, and it will also provide a functional view of traits as tools for goal pursuit. For integrating the two, we point out the many instances in which SDT motivational concepts are interpretive or goal activation processes that act as intermediaries between the inputs and outputs WTT describes. Because WTT has focused on outputs as trait manifestations, we can begin to link SDT's need satisfaction processes to traits and their manifestations. This integration leads to a key proposition that traits are tools for satisfying basic psychological needs; basic psychological needs can (partially) explain traits. This then paves the way to novel research questions.