Christopher Peterson

Christopher Peterson

Christopher Peterson, 1950 to 2012, was an American psychologist, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Psychology and Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan, and science director of the VIA Institute on Character. He was first author, with Martin Seligman, of Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, published by Oxford University Press in 2004, the three-year project that produced positive psychology's catalogue of twenty-four strengths grouped under six virtues. The strengths have held up considerably better than the architecture placed on top of them.

Who they are

The handbook was built deliberately as a counterweight to the diagnostic manuals, a classification of what goes right in a person rather than what goes wrong. Twenty-four strengths were identified and sorted under six virtues: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. It is a serious piece of scholarship, and Peterson was among the most cited psychologists of his generation.

The structural problem sits above the strengths rather than in them. The six-virtue grouping has repeatedly failed to replicate. Factor-analytic work on the VIA inventory generally recovers three to five factors rather than six, and the recovered factors do not map cleanly onto the classical virtues. The twenty-four strengths behave far better than the level above them.

That is not a hidden fact and it does not need to be treated as an accusation. The taxonomy was, in Adrian Furnham's accurate phrase, developed on a theoretical basis: the virtues were reasoned to from historical and cross-cultural sources and the strengths were then sorted underneath them. That is a design decision, honestly describable as one, and it predicts exactly the factor-analytic result the literature found. This site agrees with the critics on the six-factor structure and keeps the twenty-four-strength vocabulary, which is where the project's lasting value turns out to sit.

The point is narrower than it is often made to be. A taxonomy whose top level does not appear in the data is a vocabulary rather than a structure, and it should be cited as one. The replication record referred to here is named by this site and has not been read here directly, which is recorded on the evidence status page.

A small citation defect travels with the chapter this site reads him through. Furnham's prose quotes Park and Peterson (2006) for the definition of a character strength, where his own reference list gives Park, Peterson and Seligman. Cite the reference-list version until someone resolves it.

Key papers

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004), Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, Oxford University Press. The founding classification, twenty-four strengths under six virtues, and the work everything on this page concerns. Peterson is first author.

Park, Peterson and Seligman (2006). The source of the definition of a character strength used downstream. Cited in Furnham's prose as Park and Peterson; the reference-list version is given here.

Key ideas

Twenty-four strengths, six virtues. The strengths are the durable part and the virtues are the part the data does not recover.

The classification was reasoned to rather than derived from data, which its authors describe openly. The factor-analytic result is what that design predicts.

Three to five factors, not six. Analyses of the VIA inventory do not recover the classical virtue structure, and the recovered factors do not map onto it.

A vocabulary is not a structure. The handbook gave the field a usable language for strengths, and that is what it should be cited for.

Peterson is first author. The handbook is frequently attributed to Seligman alone.

Sources

  1. Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004), Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, Oxford University Press.
  2. Park, Peterson & Seligman (2006). Definition of a character strength, cited per the reference list rather than per the quoting prose.
  3. Furnham, A. (2024), The New Psychology, chapter 39. The secondary treatment this site reads him through, and the source of the citation defect noted above.
  4. Vault note: [[Christopher Peterson]], which records the factor-structure position and that the replication record is named here rather than read here.