Dove e quando

Whole Trait Theory articulates an account of individuals’ traits that incorporates social-cognitive responsiveness to situations into the nature of traits themselves. It articulates two parts of individuals’ traits, which are joined together into whole traits. One part of individuals’ traits is the descriptive part, and describes how much people enact the trait content in their behavior. The other part is the explanatory part, and consists of social-cognitive, motivational, and biological mechanisms that cause the trait contents people enact in their behavior. Multiple studies have shown that trait-content enactments vary substantially from context to context.  Nonetheless, people differ in average trait-content enactments in very consistent and reliable ways. Additionally, these descriptive accounts of personality were found to be predicted by social-cognitive mechanisms; people appear to change states in order to accomplish the consequences desired by current goals at the time. In this talk, I provide an overview of Whole Trait Theory, and argue that it represents an exciting new avenue for interdisciplinary collaboration for studying virtue, as well as a basis for a richly developed psychological theory that could defend its position in favor of virtue ethics.