Character: Who We Are and Who We Are Becoming
By Lynn Barendsen, Shelby Clark, and Kirsten McHugh
Think for a moment about a time when you were proud of how you handled a difficult situation. Maybe you spoke up when it would have been easier to stay quiet. Maybe you admitted that you were wrong. Maybe you persisted with something difficult, asked for help, changed your mind after hearing another perspective, or stood by someone who needed support.
Now think about a time when you wish you had acted differently.
What do these moments tell you about your character?
Other questions we might ask include:
What qualities do you most want to cultivate in yourself?
Who has influenced the kind of person you have become?
Are you the same person at home, at school, at work, and with friends?
How do your values show up in your actions?
Can qualities such as courage, curiosity, persistence, or loyalty ever work against us?
How much can character change over time?
So what exactly do we mean by character? Character is sometimes described as a collection of strengths or virtues: honesty, courage, compassion, curiosity, humility, perseverance, fairness, or open-mindedness, for example. These qualities matter. But we understand character as more than a list of desirable dispositions.
Character involves the values, dispositions, habits, judgments, and ways of responding that we develop over time and express through our actions. It helps shape how we treat others, how we approach learning and work, how we respond when things become difficult, and what we do when different values or responsibilities come into conflict.
Importantly, character is not simply something we either “have” or do not have. Nor do we think it is especially useful to divide the world into people with “good character” and people with “bad character.” Character develops throughout our lives. It is influenced by our experiences, our relationships, our communities, and the situations in which we find ourselves.
At the C³ Lab, character is one of the three ideas at the center of our work. But character is hardly a new concern for us. For more than three decades, The Good Project at Project Zero has studied what it means to do good work—work that is excellent, ethical, and engaging—and what helps people carry out such work over time. Questions about ethics, values, responsibility, reflection, models and mentors, and difficult decisions are all, in important ways, questions about character.
The creation of the C³ Lab gives us an opportunity to put character more explicitly at the center of our research and practice—and to explicitly connect our work with scholarship and focused on character.
Values and character
Our earlier work on values provides one useful starting point. Values are principles and beliefs that matter to us and help guide our choices. They may include things such as family, achievement, creativity, justice, faith, independence, service, learning, or community. But valuing courage is not quite the same thing as being courageous.
We may deeply value honesty and still find ourselves reluctant to tell the truth when doing so carries a cost. We may value curiosity but hesitate to ask a question in a classroom where we worry that others will think we should already know the answer. We may value compassion but fail to recognize when someone around us needs support.
Character is one way that values become visible. It is expressed through what we notice, how we think, what we feel, the judgments we make, and ultimately what we do. This also means that character involves practice. A person does not become open-minded simply by deciding that open-mindedness is important. We become better able to consider perspectives different from our own by repeatedly encountering those differences, listening carefully, examining our assumptions, and sometimes changing our minds.
Similarly, courage develops partly through opportunities to act courageously. Responsibility develops when we are entrusted with genuine responsibilities. Intellectual humility develops when we discover that what we believed with confidence turns out to be incomplete or wrong. Learning experiences can therefore be important experiences of character formation.
Character is complicated
Of course, no single character strength is always beneficial. Persistence is often admirable—but should we persist indefinitely with an approach that clearly is not working? Loyalty can strengthen families, friendships, teams, and communities—but what if loyalty asks us to overlook harmful behavior? Confidence can help people take risks and lead—but confidence without humility can make it difficult to listen. Even courage requires judgment. Taking a risk simply for the sake of taking a risk is not necessarily courageous—or wise.
This is one reason we are interested not only in individual character strengths but also in practical wisdom: understanding what a particular situation calls for, recognizing competing values and responsibilities, and deciding how different strengths might work together.
Our Good Project work with ethical dilemmas has taught us just how rarely difficult choices involve a straightforward “right” and “wrong.” More often, people are choosing among competing goods, responsibilities, relationships, and consequences. Character becomes particularly visible in these uncertain spaces.
Different dimensions of character
Character scholars distinguish among different dimensions of character.
Moral character includes qualities connected with how we treat others and what we understand to be right or just—for example, compassion, honesty, fairness, and integrity.
Intellectual character concerns how we approach knowledge, inquiry, and learning. Curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, carefulness, and a willingness to reconsider our assumptions are examples.
Performance character includes qualities that help us carry out difficult tasks, such as persistence, self-discipline, resilience, or initiative.
Civic character asks how we understand ourselves in relation to communities and the responsibilities we have as members of those communities.
These categories can be useful, but they overlap considerably. Asking a difficult question in class, for example, may require intellectual curiosity, courage, persistence, and enough trust in others to risk acknowledging confusion.
Our current research on intellectual risk-taking offers a particularly useful example.
We are studying behaviors such as asking clarifying questions, acknowledging confusion, and proposing new ideas even when someone is uncertain about whether those ideas will be correct. These behaviors can support learning, yet students often do not carry them out simply because they possess a particular disposition towards being courageous.
A student may be deeply curious but remain quiet because previous questions have been dismissed. Another may be willing to take intellectual risks with a trusted teacher but not among unfamiliar peers. A third may have learned that being visibly uncertain carries particular social or academic costs.
This brings us to the second C in our name: culture.
Character never develops in isolation
Families teach us what matters, both explicitly and implicitly. Teachers and peers communicate which behaviors are admired and which are discouraged. Communities carry traditions, histories, beliefs, and understandings about what it means to live well and to be responsible to others. Institutions reward certain kinds of achievement. Media provide models we may imitate. Our identities and experiences influence what opportunities are available to us and how our actions are interpreted. All of these contexts help shape character.
Culture also operates at a smaller, more immediate scale. A classroom, workplace, team, or organization develops its own culture through the norms, routines, relationships, expectations, and everyday interactions that shape what people feel able and encouraged to do. These cultures can make qualities like curiosity, honesty, compassion, courage, or intellectual risk-taking easier—or harder—to practice. In this sense, culture is not only something we inherit or belong to; it is also something we continually create together. Paying attention to character therefore means asking not only what qualities we hope individuals will develop, but what kinds of environments will help those qualities take root and flourish.
A focus on culture has become especially important in our work with the Good Futures Coalition, a community-led partnership in northern New Mexico that centers Indigenous and multicultural wisdom in educator and social work preparation. Work like this pushes against the assumption that there is one universal list of character strengths, understood and expressed identically everywhere.
Different communities may emphasize different responsibilities, relationships, traditions, or ways of understanding what it means to be a good person, learner, educator, or community member. Qualities such as honesty, compassion, courage, justice, or responsibility appear across many traditions. But how those qualities are understood, prioritized, balanced, taught, and enacted may differ significantly. In our efforts to support character development, it’s crucial that we pay attention not only to individuals but also to the environments in which they live and learn.
The three Cs are connected
This relationship among individual development, context, and action is at the heart of the C³ Lab.
Character influences how people respond to the world around them.
Culture shapes which qualities are encouraged, modeled, rewarded, or made difficult to practice.
And change becomes possible when people use their judgment, relationships, knowledge, and character to improve the conditions around them.
The relationship works in all directions. Cultures shape people, and people also shape cultures. For us, this means that character education cannot simply involve telling young people to “be courageous” or “show empathy.” We also have to ask whether the cultures of their schools, classrooms, organizations, and communities make those qualities possible. If we want students to demonstrate curiosity, are their questions genuinely welcomed? If we want them to develop responsibility, do they have meaningful opportunities to take responsibility? If we value open-mindedness, do adults model what it looks like to reconsider their own views? If we hope young people will contribute to their communities, do they have opportunities to participate in decisions that affect them? These questions move character from an abstract ideal into everyday practice.
Questions we continue to ask
As the C³ Lab grows, character will remain a central area of inquiry. Some of the questions we are thinking about include:
How does character develop across different stages of life?
Which aspects of character are widely shared, and which are particularly shaped by culture and context?
What kinds of learning experiences help people develop qualities such as curiosity, courage, humility, empathy, and responsibility?
How do we recognize or assess character without reducing complex human qualities to a score?
What happens when important character strengths come into conflict?
How do models, mentors, peers, and communities influence who we become?
How do institutional environments make it easier—or harder—for people to act according to their values and character?
How can learning help people not simply succeed within the world as it is, but become thoughtful participants in shaping what it might become?