Perceiving persons and their purposes: teleology, normativity, and personal identity

ABSTRACT

Multiple investigations find a close association between morality and identity: morally-relevant traits are perceived as more definitive of personal identity than nonmoral traits. Three studies tested whether teleological cognition explains this moral essentialism in folk reasoning about personal identity. In Study 1, moral traits were perceived as both more identity-relevant and more purpose-relevant than nonmoral traits. In Studies 2A and 2B, whether characters continued to fulfill social-role functions influenced perceptions of their authenticity and identity persistence across cases of personal change. These studies also suggest potential additional nuance to these patterns depending on changes’ valence. Overall, these findings indicate that teleology affects how people intuitively understand personal identity, and that teleological and normative/moral judgments are intertwined in this domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Teleology
• folk psychology
• moral essentialism
• normativity
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

The current work was approved by the Texas A&M Human Research Protection Program (IRB2017–0641D).

Notes

1. It should be noted that power analyses for within-subjects designs are controversial (e.g., Albers & Lakens, 2017), and these calculations may not be the best possible estimates of the necessary sample size to achieve adequate power. However, they represent a good-faith effort to ensure that this study was adequately powered.

2. Initially, the full set of 32 traits was presented to each participant. However, this took most participants longer than the 30 minutes that had been allotted for the study. Thus, the design was modified so that each participant was presented with a subset of 16 out of the 32 traits (4 selected at random from each conceptual category). Fifty participants completed ratings for all 32 traits, and the remaining 228 completed the study with the modified design.

3. There is extensive evidence that people distinguish broadly between traits pertaining to warmth and competence (for a review see Fiske et al., 2007). While some person perception scholars (e.g., Wojciszke, 2005) identify morality with the warmth dimension, Goodwin et al. (2014) find that moral character can be meaningfully distinguished from both warmth and competence.

4. We also conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on the full set of trait-rating items (including the morality, purposiveness, and identity-relatedness items) to gauge the three variables’ empirical independence. The results of these analyses (which are available on OSF) were consistent with a three-factor structure aligning with the three composite variables we computed.

5. Mauchly’s test of sphericity was significant for this ANOVA, W = .65, χ² = 115.84, p < .001, and accordingly these results are reported with a Greenhouse-Geisser adjustment of ε = .77 applied to the degrees of freedom

6. Mauchly’s test of sphericity was significant for both identity relevance (Mauchly’s W = .75, χ² = 79.05, p < .001) and purposiveness (Mauchly’s W = .75, χ² = 79.62, p < .001), and accordingly results for each dependent measure are reported with a Greenhouse-Geissser adjustment applied to the degrees of freedom at ε = .84 for identity relevance and ε = .85 for purposiveness.

7. This interpretation is complicated by the fact that five of the low-warmth, high-morality traits were themselves relationally relevant (namely fair, just, honest, trustworthy, and loyal). To explore this further, we compared identity-relevance, purposiveness, and morality ratings between the moral traits that were relational (i.e., all the high-warmth moral traits, plus these five low-warmth traits) and those that were nonrelational (i.e., courageous, principled, and responsible). These results, available on OSF, indicated that relational moral traits were perceived as equally identity-relevant, slightly less purposive, and more moral than nonrelational moral traits. So, while revealing some differences between relational and nonrelational moral traits, these results confirm that relational traits are not seen as more identity-relevant or purpose-relevant than nonrelational moral traits.

Additional information

Funding

The current research was supported by a 2017 Heritage Dissertation Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, awarded to Andrew Christy.