Luppo Kuillman

Moral reasoning explained by personality traits 61 3 All in all, the above literature does not paint a consistent picture of the direct relationship between the Big Five personality traits and moral reasoning. Openness seems to most consistently have positive relationships with moral reasoning, but this trait is not directly conceptually one that would be considered characteristic of a moral person. The other traits (i.e., conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability (reverse of neuroticism) and extraversion) do not always consistently correlate with moral reasoning. We, therefore, conclude that the outcomes are neither consistent nor reproducible across varying study populations. Higher-order meta-traits of personality One reason for the inconsistent results could be the systematically known autocorrelations between these personality traits (Costa & McCrae 1992), which hamper the study of the independent effect of the Big Five traits. To address the issue of autocorrelation, researchers measure personality at a higher aggregation level. First, Digman transformed the Big Five components into two higher-order meta- traits of personality, denoted as α and β (Digman 1997). The α factor comprises the following Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness and emotional stability (reverse of neuroticism); the β factor comprises the traits extraversion and openness. These two higher-order components were tested by DeYoung, Peterson and Higgins with the α factor labeled ‘Stability’ and the β factor ‘Plasticity’ (DeYoung et al. 2002). They were then confirmed by Van der Linden, Te Nijenhuis and Bakker in a meta- analysis across several studies (Van der Linden et al. 2010). The meta-trait Stability reflects the extent to which an individual is consistent in motivation and avoids social interactions and disruptions in mood, while Plasticity reflects the extent to which a person actively searches for new and rewarding experiences, or explores and engages flexibly with novelty, both intellectual and social (DeYoung 2006, Van der Linden et al. 2010). Stability aligns with the idea that certain personality traits (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability) may be considered indicators of moral personality (Brown & Treviño 2006, Walumbwa & Schaubroeck 2009, Kalshoven et al. 2011). Especially so, because the shared variance of agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability reflects characteristics such as trust, straightforwardness, altruism, self-discipline, orderliness and achievement-striving: all characteristics one may expect from moral people (DeYoung et al. 2002).