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

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.