What’s In It for Me? Beliefs About Relative Costs to Well-Being Explain Why People Deprioritize Moral Improvements

Most people are interested in improving their personality traits, yet they show little interest in improving on moral traits (e.g., compassion, honesty). Why don’t people particularly want to be more moral, and why do people prioritize improving certain traits more than others? Across four preregistered studies of U.K.-based CloudResearch (NStudy 1 = 252; NSupplemental = 110) and Behavioral Research Lab (NStudy 2a = 303, NStudy 2b = 301) participants, we test four classes of explanations. Results rule out explanations based on the ideas that moral traits are seen as more difficult to change and as either more or less causally central. Instead, results support explanations based on people perceiving fewer moral (vs. nonmoral) deficiencies and expecting fewer well-being benefits of moral (vs. nonmoral) improvements. Specifically, controlling for perceived deficiencies, people particularly seek to improve the traits that they expect will help them better achieve their goals (e.g., intelligence, efficiency) and increase their happiness (e.g., anxiety, sociability)—more so than traits that they expect will help increase their meaning in life, social connection, or social status. Although people believe that moral improvements would improve their well-being in an absolute sense, they also believe that nonmoral improvements would increase their goal attainment and day-to-day happiness even more. Thus, people are less interested in moral improvements because they (a) perceive fewer deficits on moral traits and (b) believe that nonmoral improvements would more effectively improve their happiness and goal attainment. These results show that personal well-being is a central motivation for personality change.