Luppo Kuillman

Chapter 3 70 DISCUSSION With this study, we aimed to discover whether there is a relationship between the personality meta-traits Stability and Plasticity and the level of moral reasoning and to assess whether the propensity to morally disengage explains those relationships. SEM (i.e., path analysis) provided evidence that only Stability directly increased the level of moral reasoning. This finding adds to the literature on the effect of personality traits on moral reasoning. Little previous research has addressed this question and has yielded fragmented and inconsistent outcomes and assumptions. For example, while Rest and colleagues claimed that personality traits should have weak associations with cognitive moral development (Rest et al. 1999a), several other researchers found associations between the Big Five personality traits and moral reasoning (Dollinger & LaMartina 1998, Derryberry et al. 2005, Athota et al. 2009). Notwithstanding, these findings seem rather an exception to the rule, especially considering Rest et al.’s (1999) claim that “of approximately 150 correlations between the DIT and personality measures, most are non-significant” (p. 108). One reason that findings appear neither consistent nor non-significant across varying populations might be autocorrelation among the Big Five personality traits. Transforming the Big Five personality traits into the higher-order, meta-traits Stability (α) and Plasticity (β) address the issue of autocorrelation. Our finding that Stability predicted the level of moral reasoning supports the idea that the latent trait personality-stability represents characteristics that reflect a ‘moral person’, as suggested by Brown and Treviño, 2006; Kalshoven, Den Hartog and De Hoogh, 2011 and Walumbwa and Schaubroeck, 2009. The second finding from this study is that Stability and Plasticity influence the level of moral disengagement. To our knowledge, our study is the first to investigate the relationship between these personality meta-traits and moral disengagement. While there was already evidence that separate Big Five traits are related to moral disengagement (Stevens 2010, Kish-Gephart et al. 2014, Fida et al. 2016), our data reveals that Stability and Plasticity also predict moral disengagement. These findings also suggest that Stability and Plasticity contribute to moral self-regulation. This study also found that people with a low propensity to morally disengage (i.e., high levels of moral self-control) tend to judge at higher levels of moral reasoning. This supports Bandura’s assumption that a higher level of moral reasoning is also determined by exerting moral self-control (Bandura 1991). Even though this finding