Beauty and hope: a moral beauty intervention

Abstract

Pedagogical intervention regarding engagement with natural, artistic and moral beauty can lead to an increase in trait hope. In a quasi‐experimental design with college students the intervention group showed significantly higher gain scores on trait hope than did the comparison group; the effect size was moderate. The experimental group also experienced significantly larger increases with engagement with moral beauty; the effect size was large. The discussion section focuses on integrating understanding beauty with moral education pedagogy, using a key element in philosophical definitions of beauty: unity‐in‐diversity. It is hypothesized that such pedagogy will increase engagement with natural, artistic and moral beauty and thus raise trait hope.

Acknowledgements

We thank Jon Haidt, and two anonymous JME reviewers, for excellent and helpful criticism, and suggestions for improvement, of the pre‐revised version of this paper; all infelicities are ours. We also thank Random Diessner for his comments and Christine Zerbinis for her keen editing; Becky Grinolds for bibliographic assistance; and the Faculty Development Committee at Lewis‐Clark State College for a grant that partially funded this research.