Virtue and Sustainable Behavior

A psychological perspective on virtue and sustainability stresses the individual’s perceptions, values, and motivations. Beginning with an examination of the way in which sustainability links environmental and social well-being, this chapter reviews research showing that most people do perceive sustainability to be virtuous, and therefore that sustainable behavior can be used as a way to demonstrate one’s own virtuous character. It describes some of the psychological factors that contribute to or impede that perception, including values, identity, social norms, and competing self-interest. The implications of taking an ethical perspective on motivating behavior are also considered, and the possibility that experiences in nature may even promote more virtuous behavior is explored. The chapter closes with a cautionary note about the limits of virtue in promoting behavior.

Author(s):  
Smitha Nair ◽  
Amrutha S. ◽  
Gopikumar V. ◽  
Sandhya G.

Bequest behavior is a highly delicate and complex subject which requires considerable attention by researchers across all disciplines including economics, sociology and psychology. Studying the motives behind bequests becomes critical not only from a socio-psychological perspective but also from a policy perspective. This paper attempts to explore the socio- economic reasons which influence the intention to bequest focusing specifically on the effect of religious affiliation. This study uses survey data from India to test the hypotheses drawn from the anthropology, sociology and consumer behavior literature using logistic regression technique. The results indicate that self-interest negatively impacts the probability of leaving a legacy. Surprisingly, the study finds evidence for negative relationship between religious affiliation and leaving a bequest. This study also reveals that unmarried women are less likely to leave a bequest. Unlike in the philanthropic literature, the research could not find satisfactory evidence of altruism and social norms driving bequest behavior among Indians.


Human beings have an evolved capacity for self-awareness, along with a propensity to focus primarily on their own welfare. This pervasive self-focus is reflected in thoughts, emotions, and actions whose underlying theme is the pursuit of self-interest. Although a focus on oneself has clear adaptive functions—such as physical preservation, decision making, planning, and self-regulation—this pervasive egoic mindset has psychological, interpersonal, and societal costs. In an increasingly crowded and interdependent world, there is a pressing need for the investigation of alternatives to a “me and mine first” mindset. For centuries, many philosophers, scientists, spiritual leaders, and social activists have advocated a “hypo-egoic” way of being, a psychological mindset characterized by less self-preoccupation in favor of a more inclusive, “we first” mode of functioning. In recent years, investigation of a variety of topics under the umbrella of hypo-egoicism has emerged in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy as researchers have investigated both the features of hypo-egoic states and the psychological experiences that arise when self-focused processing is reduced, such as flow, equanimity, mindfulness, compassion, and mystical states. Bringing together current scholarship and science from multiple fields, theOxford Handbook of Hypo-egoic Phenomenaprovides an authoritative overview of theory, research, and applications concerning psychological states that involve diminished self-preoccupation and self-interest. TheHandbookalso reveals the widespread implications of such hypo-egoic functioning for personal well-being, optimal behavior regulation, interpersonal relationships, and prosocial and virtuous behavior.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galia Sabar

This paper analyses homecoming experiences of African labour migrants who lived in Israel and returned home. Using qualitative research methodologies, I discerned what factors - material and non-material - determine the relative success of the return process. Focusing on these factors’ effects, I offer a new understanding of labour migrants’ homecoming experiences: those who are “content,” “readjusting,” or “lost. Following Ulrich Beck's (2006) analysis of cosmopolitanism, I suggest that these categories portray significant new life spaces that are neither what they left nor what they came from, and are dynamic, fragile, and constantly changing. In some cases the influence of economic assets on the returned migrants’ homecoming experience was indeed crucial, in many other cases the challenges of reconnecting oneself with home, family, and existing social norms and customs was much more influential on their homecoming experience including on their sense of well-being. Furthermore, some of the non-material goods such as individualization, personal responsibility, and long-term planning proved useful, others such as trust, particularly in relation to family, were detrimental.


Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
R. Philip Brown

The modem American ethos is a brand of Lockean individualism gone wrong that now embraces rapacious self-interest as its prime meridian. A new ethicalmodel is necessary to combat this radical, soulless, and excessively particularistic form of individualism. The author proposes a journeyman philosophy of organization and governance for citizen and administrative practitioner alike based upon concepts from quantum theory. This normative model of administration, called authentic individualism, has certain ramifications for a more reflexive, creative and unorthodox approach to public administration. All institutions and organizations are systems guided by general organizing principles that should discard the humans as a resource model, make employee well-being an organizational purpose, encourage humans toward a sense of moral meaning in life and work, recognize legitimate leadership as emerging from the people who make up the organization, and fulfill obligations to the community that supports them and makes them successful.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016502542199286
Author(s):  
Ellyn Charlotte Bass ◽  
Lina Maria Saldarriaga ◽  
Ana Maria Velasquez ◽  
Jonathan B. Santo ◽  
William M. Bukowski

Social norms are vital for the functioning of adolescent peer groups; they can protect the well-being of groups and individual members, often by deterring harmful behaviors, such as aggression, through enforcement mechanisms like peer victimization; in adolescent peer groups, those who violate aggression norms are often subject to victimization. However, adolescents are nested within several levels of peer group contexts, ranging from small proximal groups, to larger distal groups, and social norms operate within each. This study assessed whether there are differences in the enforcement of aggression norms at different levels. Self-report and peer-nomination data were collected four times over the course of a school year from 1,454 early adolescents ( M age = 10.27; 53.9% boys) from Bogota, Colombia. Multilevel modeling provided support for social regulation of both physical aggression and relational aggression via peer victimization, as a function of gender, grade-level, proximal (friend) or distal (class) injunctive norms of aggression (perceptions of group-level attitudes), and descriptive norms of aggression. Overall, violation of proximal norms appears to be more powerfully enforced by adolescent peer groups. The findings are framed within an ecological systems theory of adolescent peer relationships.


2016 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annmarie Grealish ◽  
Sara Tai ◽  
Andrew Hunter ◽  
Richard Emsley ◽  
Trevor Murrells ◽  
...  

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-446
Author(s):  
Herman Paul

Abstract In response to Anton Froeyman’s paper, “Virtues of Historiography,” this article argues that philosophers of history interested in why historians cherish such virtues as carefulness, impartiality, and intellectual courage would do wise not to classify these virtues unequivocally as either epistemic or moral virtues. Likewise, in trying to grasp the roles that virtues play in the historian’s professional practice, philosophers of history would be best advised to avoid adopting either an epistemological or an ethical perspective. Assuming that the historian’s virtuous behavior has epistemic and moral dimensions (as well as aesthetic, political, and other dimensions), this article advocates a non-reductionist account of historical scholarship, which acknowledges that the virtues cherished by historians usually play a variety of roles, depending on the goals they are supposed to serve. Given that not the least important of these goals are epistemic ones, the articles concludes that virtue ethical approaches, to the extent that they are focused on the acquisition of moral instead of epistemic goods, insufficiently recognize the role of virtue in the pursuit of such epistemic aims as knowledge and understanding.


2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin O. Fordham ◽  
Katja B. Kleinberg

AbstractRecent research on the sources of individual attitudes toward trade policy comes to very different conclusions about the role of economic self-interest. The skeptical view suggests that long-standing symbolic predispositions and sociotropic perceptions shape trade policy opinions more than one's own material well-being. We believe this conclusion is premature for two reasons. First, the practice of using one attitude to predict another raises questions about direction of causation that cannot be answered with the data at hand. This problem is most obvious when questions about the expected impact of trade are used to predict opinions about trade policy. Second, the understanding of self-interest employed in most studies of trade policy attitudes is unrealistically narrow. In reality, the close relationship between individual economic interests and the interests of the groups in which individuals are embedded creates indirect pathways through which one's position in the economy can shape individual trade policy preferences. We use the data employed by Mansfield and Mutz to support our argument that a more complete account of trade attitude formation is needed and that in such an account economic interests may yet play an important role.1


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (13) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Mohd Samsuri Ghazali ◽  
Sharifah Faigah Syed Alwi ◽  
Nurul Nadia Abdul Aziz ◽  
Siti Fahazarina Hazudin

This paper aimed to complete a rigorous, systematic exploration of the literature investigating the effects of psychological factors on the financial well-being in Malaysia context. We identified 13 papers that report empirical evidence on the effect of psychological factors on the financial well-being in Malaysia context. The findings conclude that the studies in financial well-being are focusing on four groups of respondents namely college student, young employees, singles mothers and Muslim individual and the eleven types of psychological variables are identified. This assemblage of reviewed research papers will be useful for the academia and government to cultivate understanding on the psychological rumblings of an individual and leading to greater financial well-being, hence uplifting the quality of life of affected parties.Keywords: Financial well-being; Financial behaviour; Psychological Factors;eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/e-bpj.v5i13.2063


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