Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

"First let me say why I shifted gears from Dostoevsky to contemporary psychology. My thought in putting together this list was to pick some central fields – like philosophy , literature and, in this case, psychology – and try to choose the best one or two books I could in those fields. That’s different, and I think more manageable for me, than trying to come up with a top five across the board. Even though I am a philosopher, much of my work on character draws heavily from psychology, and I spent years leading The Character Project which tried to foster interdisciplinary work between the two fields. When it comes to books in psychology, of which there are not many, since it is such an article-driven field, Peterson and Seligman’s Character Strengths and Virtues has been extremely influential. It was published in 2004, and was key to launching the entire positive psychology movement. Today that movement has a major journal, a leading institute, the VIA Institute, and hundreds of publications coming out every year. It’s impact has been felt in majors ways in education and health too, among other fields. Much of the work today continues to be informed by the 2004 book. “There can be controversy over whether a given character trait is a virtue or not. For instance, humility has had something of a chequered past in the West” The key to the framework Peterson and Seligman provided is the list of 24 character strengths, which I would normally call virtues. It includes traits like kindness, fairness and hope. In order to come up with their list, they drew upon the help of over 50 experts on character, and poured over the writings of religions and philosophies worldwide. They even included the traits one finds in Hallmark greeting cards and Pokémon characters! Then, using 10 different criteria they devised, they were able to cut down their huge list of character traits to this list of 24. It has become something of a standard taxonomy for studying character ever since. One reason why it is especially helpful is that there can sometimes be controversy over whether a given character trait is a virtue, or as they would say, ‘character strength,’ or not. For instance, humility has had something of a chequered past in the West, with Aristotle not much of a fan and Christianity quite the opposite. Given the scholarship that went into producing the list of 24 character strengths, there is a strong case for at least taking each of them seriously. Having said this, I don’t want to give the impression that their framework is perfect. In fact, I have a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology arguing for some pretty serious revisions to the whole thing. But that doesn’t take away from the immense influence that Peterson and Seligman’s book has had. The second option. In fact, Peterson, Seligman, and their collaborators came up with a survey measure for all 24 character strengths, the VIA-IS. It has ten items for researchers to use in measuring each strength, so 240 total items. Either this entire survey or shorter variations of it have been widely employed for years by researchers in positive psychology. One area of interest has been to see what correlations exist between how people rate themselves on a given character strength, and other important variables like subjective well-being, mood, health, exercise, criminal behaviour, and so forth. Positive psychologists would tend to say yes. Our characters are not fixed in stone. They are malleable, although change is slow and gradual and it may take months if not years in order for people to show significant improvement. To the extent that the VIA-IS is a good measure of character strengths, then it should be able to track these changes over time. And keep in mind that change can happen in either direction, so people can gradually become worse, morally speaking, too. One of the most interesting and important areas of empirical research on character today, I believe, has to do with designing interventions to try to move people’s characters in a more positive direction. For instance, there has been some work done on how gratitude journals, where you record what you are thankful for in your life, can increase one’s degree of gratitude . I would love to see a lot more work done on designing very practical initiatives to foster character improvement. I am not an expert on positive psychology, but I think it is fair to say that at the turn of the century, Seligman, Peterson, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, and others thought psychology was overly concerned with problems, diseases, and flaws. In the process, it was neglecting other areas of human concern that deeply mattered to people, such as virtue, happiness, flow, psychological health, flourishing, purpose, and meaning. Positive psychologists, from what I understand, don’t want to downplay the importance of research on things like neuroticism or depression, but they also want to see more work being done in these other, more positive areas as well."