Doing Good and Doing Well

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This fall, I’ll be teaching an introductory college course called “The Sociology of Everyday Life.” It’s one of those familiar survey courses for freshmen and sophomores in which the goal is to establish basic concepts of social science. It takes the Whitman’s Sampler approach, introducing different flavors of research in sociology and psychology and encouraging interested students to take future courses to study them in greater depth.

After a few years of teaching the course, I’ve begun to think of it as lessons in “Life 101” — how to boost your well-being through a modern understanding of virtue. Many young adults are struggling with the ethical challenges of the real world not because they aren’t good people, but because they need a refresher course on how to live an honest, successful, and productive life. The motto of my high school was “not for school, but for life we learn.” That’s how I see my course on the Sociology of Everyday Life.

In sections on the role of individuals and organizations in society, we talk about expressions of honesty and generosity (or the lack thereof). We read — and test out — the axioms in Dale Carnegie’s 1930s classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and compare them with what recent research in social psychology tells us about strategies for career advancement. The key themes in our conversation are self-control and perseverance as requirements for success. As we study the deviant behavior, corruption, Ponzi schemes, and greed that led to the Great Recession, I reintroduce the seemingly lost notion of thrift. The class creates budgets and discusses inequalities, while also talking about the values and psychology behind how we spend our money.

Some might argue that I'm devaluing the intrinsic truth of the virtues by focusing on their instrumental benefits — that is, conflating what’s good with what works. But teaching students the practical benefits of living virtuously is the most realistic first step to inculcating them with virtue. We all know that it’s good to be honest, generous, self-controlled, tenacious, and thrifty, but it’s the doing that dogs us.

The danger in instrumentalizing virtue is that the young will come to discard a particular virtue if they decide it no longer helps them to reach a desired goal. But behaving virtuously requires both right belief and right practice. Focusing on practice has two big benefits: It’s the language that young adults understand, and it’s a tried-and-true way to accomplish personal change.

As a general rule, American men and women now in their 20s aren’t known for their warm embrace of authority. For a generation that grew up on the Internet, a bureaucratic, top-down method of instruction is a non-starter. Today’s young adults live in a networked society, in which learning is collaborative and personal experience is central. The old-fashioned way to “teach virtue” may have been through church and other institutions of cultural authority, but my students aren’t interested in the bully pulpit.

In my class on the Sociology of Everyday Life, I offer a toolbox of ideas to build a happy life and let my students pick which skills to test for themselves. I explain which behaviors work in lab settings, which work in real life, and why. Then, rather than preaching about virtue, I encourage students to (re)learn the habits of good living for themselves.

This isn’t my own brilliant idea. America’s first self-help leader, Benjamin Franklin, believed that virtue could be self-taught through practice. He married the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, and community spirit with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment, creating an American sense of character. He made lists of virtues to live by, charted his progress in a notebook, and evaluated his own performance daily. Yes, he often failed, but he was a big believer in practice and repetition. Franklin shared Aristotle’s view that to acquire a virtue is to acquire the habit of exercising that virtue.

The social psychologist Roy Baumeister’s research on self-control confirms this point. Self-control is a skill. It’s a muscle that can be made stronger with practice, a habit that can be learned. And by understanding the “effective management of attention,” we can avert many challenges to our self-control. The same is true of the other virtues. If we learn more about them, how and why they work, and practice them, we can see in our own lives the benefits of behaving well.

We teach our children to act virtuously when they are young — to share, to clean up after themselves, and to tell the truth. Grown-ups need to be reminded of these lessons, too. Teaching the Sociology of Everyday Life reminds me, for instance, to turn my cell phone off when having dinner with friends, to listen with empathy, to think of others first, and to make sure my spending is in line with my values. Living a virtuous life doesn’t mean being boring or preachy. It’s about approaching the rules that we learned as children with a more mature understanding and reapplying them to our adult lives. 

Christine Whelan is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Generation WTF: Getting from "What the #%$&?" to a Wise, Tenacious and Fearless You (January 2011). Read more of her writing at www.christinewhelan.com.