Character Strengths and Virtues

What it is

The six virtues are wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. The ambition behind the scheme was a common vocabulary, so that researchers studying gratitude, bravery or curiosity would be measuring comparable things, and that ambition was a reasonable one.

The live question is whether the top level is real or a tidy arrangement imposed on the strengths underneath it. Empirical work on the inventory generally recovers three to five factors rather than six, and the recovered factors do not map cleanly onto the classical virtues the taxonomy was arranged around. A taxonomy whose top level does not appear in the data is a vocabulary rather than a structure.

The reason for that is not hidden, and the secondary source used here signals it quietly and accurately. It records that the taxonomy was developed on a theoretical basis. That is a precise concession: the six virtues were not derived from data. They were reasoned to from historical and cross-cultural sources, and the strengths were then sorted underneath them. Read carefully it explains why the factor analyses come out wrong. Read quickly it sounds like praise. The same chapter concedes plainly that defining and operationalising strengths is a major and as yet unfinished undertaking, which is honest.

In effect

The commercially successful part of the framework is the signature-strengths exercise: identify your top few, then find ways to deploy them at work and at home. That is a long way downstream of the evidence, and it inherits the factor-structure problem, because a signature strength is a position within a structure that has not been demonstrated.

The same chapter also contains the clearest case in its whole book of a claim's register outrunning its support. It asserts the now-established paradox of overused strengths, the idea that a strength pushed too far becomes a liability, and offers no evidence for it anywhere. Called established, cited nowhere.

Two smaller problems belong on the record. The four-component strengths model presented in the same chapter is the author's own published work, presented without any signal that it is his, and the chapter goes on to recommend the category of product he supplies. And the chapter misplaces the Positive Psychology Center at Pennsylvania State University when it is at the University of Pennsylvania, and attributes ten happiness myths to unnamed leading researchers. Neither is usable.

The test this family of constructs most needs is the one it is rarely asked to take. Twenty-four self-report labels invite the jingle-jangle question directly: how many distinct things are underneath them, and what does any of it add once the five-factor traits have been measured?

What it does not say

It does not say the six virtues have been found in the data. Three to five factors is the usual recovery, and they do not map onto the classical virtues.

It does not say the 24 strengths are worthless. They behave better than the layer above them, and the common vocabulary was a real contribution.

It does not support the overused-strengths paradox. That claim is presented as established in the source used here with nothing behind it.

It does not come with checkable figures from that source. Sample sizes and factor-analytic results are not given, and the failed replications are named by this publication rather than read here.

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