| Summary: | What motivates people to devote their lives to promoting the greater good? This dissertation advances the reconciliation model, which explains moral motivation within a developmental framework by positing that, for the mature, the relationship between self-promoting (agentic) and other-promoting (communal) motives transforms from one of mutual competition to one of synergy. That is, the model proposes that moral exemplars, in particular, integrate agency and communion in their psychological functioning. Most people, on the other hand, do not become highly virtuous partly because they developmentally stagnate, failing to integrate these motives. The majority of leaders and other successful people also fail to integrate the two, and instead continue to develop agentic motives while attenuating communal motives, resulting in unmitigated agency. Three studies test claims concerning the endpoints of development. Relying on a young-adult sample of student club leaders, Study 1 pinpoints the specific values that usually compete within the moral domain. Study 2 finds evidence of integrated agency and communion in the personalities of recipients of a national award for decades of contribution to the greater good (in contrast to a demographically matched comparison group). Study 3 explores the motives of a “moral dream team” compared to those of a similarly influential set of heroes, icons, leaders, and revolutionaries. The findings are that exemplars treat agency as a means to an end of communion while, for most influential people, agency merely begets more agency. Agency, communion, and the relationship between them hold considerable promise in explaining moral motivation, its development, and the processes that support lives of extraordinary moral commitment. === Arts, Faculty of === Psychology, Department of === Graduate
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