Virtue trade-offs in everyday life.

Authors

Qilin Zhang, Jeremy Jacobson, Benjamin Hardin, Jessie Sun

Published in

Journal of personality and social psychology. Jul 30, 2026. Epub Jul 30, 2026.

Abstract

Is it usually possible to be virtuous in all ways, or do people experience ubiquitous trade-offs among moral virtues? Past work has examined a limited set of virtue pairs (e.g., honesty vs. compassion, fairness vs. loyalty) and focused on situations in which trade-offs are likely to occur. Across 2 day reconstruction method studies featuring representative U.S. samples, we investigate the frequency and experience of trade-offs among 12 virtues in everyday life. In Study 1 (N = 377), participants reported virtue conflicts during 12,385 episodes across 1 week. In Study 2 (N = 988), participants elaborated on one trade-off episode. Trade-offs most often involved honesty and courage, and coding of open-ended responses showed that many (but not all) trade-offs reflected a general tension between benevolence and integrity. Overall, however, prevalence estimates suggested that virtue enactments tend to be largely compatible in daily life. People felt less happy when they experienced a virtue trade-off, but it also mattered how they resolved them. People most often prioritized one virtue over the other (57%) but were most satisfied with their decision in the rare cases (12%) when they overcame the trade-off by showing high levels of both virtues. Finally, there was a general mismatch between people's proclaimed virtue preferences and which virtues they prioritized when they experienced an everyday trade-off (e.g., people prioritized honesty the most in the abstract but the least in everyday decisions). These findings highlight the importance of studying moral decision-making in ecologically valid contexts and have implications for moral education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:
42531011
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 31 Jul 2026.

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