What really makes someone a good person? 

Psychologist and neuroscientist Sarah Schnitker studies how traits like patience, courage, and compassion are built through repeated practice in real-life situations. She’s found that virtues grow not from comfort, but from challenge. 

She shares how in one study, for example, people who fasted during Ramadan for spiritual reasons showed lasting increases in self-control weeks later. These moral habits take time and intention to build, but they not only improve our own well-being, they also help strengthen the communities we’re part of.

SARAH SCHNITKER: I think people often think of virtues as about the self, and am I happy and fulfilled? But that self starts to look kind of empty if it is not stretching outwards.

You really do need to train for virtue. It requires habits. It requires a community. It requires a lot of work. But just because something is difficult doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

And if we look around at society, now, potentially more than ever, we need people to be compassionate and just and kind. We're not ever going to really attain perfect virtue. Instead, we're moving farther along this trajectory toward being a better person.

I'm Sarah Schnitker. I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, studying how people build virtue.

So a virtue is a disposition that we hold to act in a moral way. We think of them as habits. These are things you can cultivate by practices over time. And then those habits need to be connected to a certain type of identity of who I am, that's moral and transcends the self.

When we think about virtues, we talk about doing the right thing. And that's a really tricky question to define. What is the right thing? These are conflicts that philosophers have had for millennia. And so that tells me there's something there, and we should use our scientific tools to address that question.

Our data show very consistently that people who are virtuous have higher well-being. They have more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, report greater satisfaction with life, greater meaning in life. And so what we hope to do is to help people train to become virtuous.

If we’re thinking about, okay, how do I move from the abstract of wanting virtues in my life to actually putting this into practice? It's hard. We are very habitual creatures. And what you see in the research is that you’re actually going to have to practice them in the situations that require them.

If you seek to cultivate, say, patience, you're going to actually have to wait. To build courage, you will likely need to face threats.

You know, you might think that virtues are this tool, this technology that we can use to hack our way in life and improve and optimize performance. We want to be careful about that idea.

All of the self-help movement talks about the three easy steps to instantly change who you are and wants to sell a product to change your virtue, which is honestly completely wrong about how virtues actually form.

If I'm doing the virtue for my own happiness or for my own performance, I lose the moral component. And we find that people actually struggle more to practice that virtue when it's just about the self versus the community and the relationality that's necessary for virtue development.

You do actually see a lot of religious traditions and other practices people add to their life to develop virtues over time. So, for example, with fasting, many people engage intermittent fasting for health and fitness reasons. We know it has benefits. But it seems that the practice of fasting might differ when it's practiced for those health and fitness benefits, than if it's engaged as a spiritual practice.

For example, Ramadan: From sunrise to sunset, there is no food or drink. That is a difficult, adverse experience to have to go for a day without eating or drinking. And we have data that when fasting is practiced within the sacred frame, not only do people grow in their virtues during the period of that fast, they also sustain increases in self-control and patience, even a month after the fasting period is over. And so it leads to virtue growth and not just the health and fitness benefits.

What we do see is that as it becomes habituated and well practiced, it starts to feel less effortful. You just want to do the right thing. You automatically do the right thing, and it's your second nature to just be virtuous.

Humans survive not because we're the biggest or most powerful. We survive as a species because we are hypersocial. And so virtues that support that social function do tend to show up across cultures—generosity, compassion, kindness.

We're all born with capacities for goodness and also for great evil. And sometimes you do see people have narratives around embodying vice, that I'm going to be the richest person, and I'm going to walk all over other people to get what's best for me.

But we create our own social context. When I'm in a group, I actually change what that group is. If I start acting virtuously, it’s really powerful. People will start to become more virtuous in response. It will influence the group and raise everyone up.

It's not self-improvement. It's about benefiting others. We need to move that focus away from just my own self-improvement, and toward how am I contributing and how am I related to others in communities for the greater good?