Below you’ll find an abstract that I submitted for presentation at the Association for Moral Education’s 2025 annual conference. It didn’t really fit with the conference theme, but it was accepted for a poster presentation. I will include the poster below once I have made it. I submitted the same abstract for the European Character and Virtue Association’s 2025 conference, but it was rejected.
The abstract highlights a problem that occurred to me while writing my PhD research proposal. A large part of moral development involves gaining increasingly autonomous motivation for morally good behaviours (see Key concepts). For example, if I start out being kind only to earn rewards, but eventually come to value kindness for its own sake, then I will have undergone some moral development.
However, in line with ethical research guidelines, most character education studies recruit on voluntary participants. But volunteers are already highly autonomous – otherwise they wouldn’t have volunteered! This means that these studies tend to recruit children who are already highly morally developed. In effect, character education is often being trialled on those who need it least. This risks creating an ever-widening “character gap”.
I suggest that this issue might be mitigated by encouraging participation in character education studies via extrinsic rewards. Admittedly, this raises problems of its own – which I’ve discussed elsewhere – but it may at least lead to more representative sampling.
[Poster coming soon]