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Moral perfectionism and moral values, virtues, and judgments: A preliminary investigation

Yang, Hongfei, Stoeber, Joachim, Wang, Yanchun (2015) Moral perfectionism and moral values, virtues, and judgments: A preliminary investigation. Personality and Individual Differences, 75 . pp. 229-233. ISSN 0191-8869. (doi:10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.040) (KAR id:45135)

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Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.040

Abstract

Moral perfectionism has a long tradition in philosophical inquiry, but so far has been ignored in psychological research. This article presents a first psychological investigation of moral perfectionism exploring its relationships with moral values, virtues, and judgments. In three studies, 539 university students responded to items of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Frost, Marten, Lahart, & Rosenblate, 1990) adapted to measure personal moral standards (PMS) and concern over moral mistakes (CMM) and completed measures of moral values, virtues, and forgiveness, gratitude, and wrong behavior judgments. When partial correlations were computed controlling for the overlap between PMS and CMM, PMS showed positive correlations with moral values, virtues, reciprocal helping, forgiveness, and condemnation of wrong behaviors. In contrast, CMM showed a positive correlation only with indebtedness and a negative correlation with self-reliance. The present findings, while preliminary, suggest that moral perfectionism is a personality characteristic that may help explain individual differences in moral values, virtues, and judgments.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.040
Uncontrolled keywords: moral perfectionism; personal standards; concern over mistakes; moral values; virtues; moral judgments; forgiveness; gratitude
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User: Joachim Stoeber
Date Deposited: 21 Nov 2014 10:17 UTC
Last Modified: 08 Dec 2022 17:18 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/45135 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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