When Benjamin Franklin was an old man he revealed
the secret of his fulfilling life. It was, he said, a technique
that he had invented in his twenties to improve his
personality.
The personality that Franklin began shaping was already
standing on a strong foundation. Ever since childhood he
was, according to his Autobiography, “the leader among the
boys.”1 But this same assertiveness cost him dearly by leading
his father to withdraw him from the Boston Latin School,
where he had been enrolled to prepare him for the clergy.
Even though Franklin was at the top of his class and seemed
destined for Harvard, then a Puritan finishing school, his
father decided that he was too irreverent to be a minister and
apprenticed the 12-year-old to his brother, James, a printer.2
Fortunately the work in the printing shop allowed Franklin
to indulge his passion for reading and gave him the
opportunity for an ambitious program of self-education.
In studying essays from a London periodical he learned to
write so well that he was soon publishing satirical pieces in
his brother’s newspaper. He was also strong-willed enough to
escape from his apprenticeship. At the age of 17 he ran away
to Philadelphia with only a few coins in his pocket.
During the next few years Franklin had his share of
youthful adventures. But as he settled into young adulthood,
he felt the need to take more charge of his life. To this end
he decided to curb his passions, break some bad habits, and
build up the moral part of his personality, generally called
character.
The approach Franklin took to building good character
began by identifying its essential ingredients. Franklin
was already clear about the character traits that interested
him, which he called “the moral virtues.” But when he got
down to making a list of them, he ran into the terminological
problem that continues to bedevil contemporary discussions
of personality because “different writers included more
or fewer ideas under the same name.” In Franklin’s case, he
decided “for the sake of clearness, to use rather more names,
with fewer ideas annexed to each,” and settled on 13 virtues,
with brief explanations:
• Temperance —Eat not to dullness; drink not to
elevation.
• Silence —Speak not but what may benefit others or
yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
• Order —Let all your things have their places; let each
part of your business have its time.
• Resolution —Resolve to perform what you ought;
perform without fail what you resolve.
• Frugality —Make no expense but to do good to others
or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
• Industry —Lose no time; be always employed in something
useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
• Sincerity —Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently
and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
• Justice —Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting
the benefits that are your duty.
• Moderation —Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries
so much as you think they deserve.
• Cleanliness —Tolerate no uncleanliness in body,
clothes, or habitation.
• Tranquility —Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents
common or unavoidable.
• Chastity —Rarely use venery but for health or offspring,
never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of
your own or another’s peace or reputation
• Humility —Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
Having laid out his list, Franklin immediately got started
in a methodical way. Recognizing that he could not acquire
these virtues all at once, he set to work on them one at a time.
Believing that “the previous acquisition of some might facilitate
the acquisition of certain others,” he arranged them in
that particular order: “Temperance first, as it tends to procure
that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary
where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard
maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient
habits, and the force of perpetual temptations.” What Franklin
particularly had in mind when starting with temperance
was to stop drinking so much at pubs, which had led him
astray in the past. So for the first week of his program, he
concentrated on temperance. He then continued down the
list, completing all 13 in a quarter of a year and then starting
over again. Day by day he kept a record in a tiny book
in which he “might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I
found upon examination to have been committed respecting
that virtue.”
He found this daily record keeping both informative and
rewarding. On the one hand, he was surprised to be “so much
fuller of faults than I had imagined”; on the other hand, he
was pleased with “the satisfaction of seeing them diminished.”
But despite his progress, Franklin kept returning to
the program from time to time and always carried his list
with him, even in old age. In assessing this lifetime of practice,
he concluded, “[T]hough I never arrived at the perfection
I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of
it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and happier man than I
otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
Franklin had good reasons to be satisfied with the results.
Within a decade of setting his self-improvement program
in motion, he had built a printing and publishing business
that would leave him well off. With this newfound financial
security, he was able to pursue his interests in science
and statesmanship, which led to brilliant achievements and
worldwide fame. But even more than these trappings of success,
Franklin was grateful for “that evenness of temper, and
that cheerfulness in conversation” that he attributed to his
devoted practice of “the joint influence of the whole mass
of virtues, even in the imperfect state he was able to acquire
them.” So convinced was he of the value of his program that
he kept toying with the possibility of publishing a self-help
book called The Art of Virtue, to supplement what he had
already explained in his Autobiography.
Separating Character and Personality
Some of Benjamin Franklin’s ideas about personality have a
great deal in common with those I have discussed so far. He,
too, recognized that people’s individual differences could
be thought of in terms of a set of traits. He, too, recognized
that they are influenced by genes (which he called “natural
inclination”) and by environmental factors such as culture
(“custom”) and peers (“company”). And, being a lover of lists,
Franklin would have been happy to organize his thoughts
about his basic personality tendencies in terms of the Big
Five.
Had Franklin assessed his own Big Five traits while drafting
the self-improvement plan, he would have found much he
was pleased with. The most obvious was his very high Extraversion,
especially gregariousness, enthusiasm, and good
humor. Also obvious was his self-confidence and freedom
from negative emotions, signs of low Neuroticism, and his
curiosity and creativity, signs of high Openness.
But Franklin wasn’t particularly interested in these characteristics,
which he considered part of his God-given temperament
and which he took for granted. Instead, he was raised to believe that the most important part of personality
was its moral aspect, which was acquired through personal
effort. To Franklin, this meant that he could build his own
character by working on those virtues that seemed in most
need of improvement. He also believed that good character
was his ticket to both productivity and happiness.
Franklin was not alone in this belief. Through the ages
philosophers and religious leaders have encouraged the
development of good character. What mainly distinguished
Franklin’s ideas from those of his predecessors was his elaborate
practical method for self-improvement. Instead of simply
singing the praises of a series of virtues, Franklin wrote out
a personal to-do list and a step-by-step plan for upgrading
one virtue at a time. Recognizing that backsliding is natural,
he committed himself to repeated practice. Recognizing that
some virtues, such as humility and order, were particularly
hard for him to achieve, he decided to lower his standards
and cut himself some slack. The result was a program that
was explicit, realistic, and, as he looked back on it, seemingly
effective.
Over the years, Franklin’s ideas about character attracted
many admirers. He also had some critics who disagreed with
the list of moral virtues he chose to emphasize. But despite
such disagreements, most Americans who lived in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries shared the view that
character was the most significant part of personality—and
the part that could be improved through conscious effort. Nevertheless, when scientific studies of personality were
getting underway in the 1930s, the decision was made to
separate the concept of character from the concept of personality.
A leading proponent of this separation was Gordon
Allport, whose research on categorizing personality traits I
described in Chapter 1. Having been raised in a pious Midwestern
Methodist family, Allport recognized that his personal
values were not shared by everyone and had no place in
his scientific work. As he put it:
Whenever we speak of character we are likely to
imply a moral standard and make a judgment of
value. This complication worries psychologists who
wish to keep the actual structure and functioning
of personality free from judgments of moral acceptability
…. Now one may, of course, make a judgment
of value concerning a personality as a whole, or
concerning any part of personality: “He is a noble
fellow.” “She has many endearing qualities.” In both
cases we are saying that the person in question has
traits which, when viewed by some outside social or
moral standards, are desirable. The raw psychological
fact is that the person’s qualities are simply what
they are. Some observers (and some cultures) may
find them noble and endearing; others may not.
For this reason—and to be consistent with our own
definition—we prefer to define character as personality
evaluated; and personality, if you will, as character
devaluated..So when Allport scanned the dictionary to collect the raw
material for a study of personality traits, he excluded words
such as virtuous and noble that make moral judgments. Others
who developed the Big Five followed his lead. Although
they named some facets with moral-sounding words such as
altruism and modesty, they insisted on using them in a purely
descriptive way without expressing opinions about the merits
of high or low scores.
The clinicians who defined the Top Ten patterns in
DSM-IV also tried to withhold moral judgments. Trained
to be open-minded about their patients’ behavior, they were
guided by a professional code of conduct that used functional
concepts such as adaptive and maladaptive rather than moral
ones such as good and bad. Their functional view recognizes
that there may be advantages and disadvantages to degrees
of expression of different traits and patterns, and that any of
them can be adaptive in certain circumstances.
But even though this functional view appears morally
neutral, it recognizes that certain patterns are worth singling
out because they tend to bring grief to those who express
them and to those they deal with. In fact, the negative reaction
to these troublesome patterns is the main reason they are
considered maladaptive. And because such negative reactions
are frequently expressed as moral judgments, it should come
as no surprise that features of the Top Ten are also spoken of
as “character flaws” in ordinary conversation.
Identifying maladaptive patterns as character flaws isn’t
just an idiosyncratic judgment. There appears to be a widespread
preference for people who are honest, courageous,
emotionally stable, flexible, productive, modest, generous,
trusting, sociable, and only moderately quirky—the sorts of
individuals with none of the ten flaws on the list. Put simply,
behaviors that we consider signs of good character may also
be adaptive because most of us recognize them as being desirable,
prefer to deal with those who express them, and tend to
stay away from those who do not.
We make such judgments all the time. And we place heavy
emphasis on character in our intuitive assessments of people.
Although our minds are naturally tuned to notice all of a
person’s major traits, those traits that really grab our attention
and dominate our thinking have a moral flavor that is
linked to emotional reactions
