Understanding Society

I've been seriously interested in the question of character since being invited to contribute to a volume on the subject a few year...

We have a pretty good idea of the characteristics that support very high individual performance in a variety of fields, from jazz to ...

image: Stanford prison experiment John Doris argues in Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior that the basic theory of acti...

image: Molière's Tartuffe , Comédie Française When we judge that a person has acted on the basis of character in a given situation,...

One thing I find interesting about the sustained demonstrations and protests in Madison, Wisconsin is the fact that people on the streets d...

One of Adam Smith's contributions to the study of philosophical ethics is his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments . It is an interes...

How does a group of people succeed in coming together to contribute to a collective project over an extended period of time?  For example...

The concept of a "moral economy" has proved useful in attempting to describe and explain the contentious behavior of peasants in r...

How do norms influence behavior? More fundamentally, what is a norm? The question arises for two separate reasons. First, we are intereste...