Personality processes of everyday moral courage

Abstract

Introduction: Moral courage manifests in acts intended to intervene to stopor redress witnessed moral norm violations, despite the risk of negative conse-quences for the intervener. We investigate moral courage in everyday life and askwhat personality processes are involved. Based on an extended process modelof moral courage, we derived hypotheses on cognitive and emotional processesthat should facilitate or hinder intervention. Further, we identified candidate per-sonality dispositions that should shape these processes and thereby predict whotends to intervene against others' norm violations and who does not.Methods: Using a quota-based sample of the German population (N = 1108), weconducted a personality assessment, followed by a 7-day experience samplingduring which participants reported norm violations witnessed in their daily lifeas well as their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions.Results: In total, 678 participants reported 1965 norm violations and intervenedagainst 32% of them. Dispositional self-efficacy facilitated intervention by increas-ing a sense of efficacy when confronted with others' norm violations. Conversely,dispositional moral disengagement hindered intervention by reducing perceivedown responsibility.Discussion: Our findings provide novel insights into the situations affordingmoral courage in everyday life, and the personality processes that uniquely guidethis behavior.

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