Project on the Good Physician: Further Evidence for the Validity of a Moral Intuitionist Model of Virtuous Caring.

Theory: In the Project on the Good Physician, the authors propose a moral intuitionist model of virtuous caring that places the virtues of Mindfulness, Empathic Compassion, and Generosity at the heart of medical character education.

Hypotheses: Hypothesis 1a: The virtues of Mindfulness, Empathic Compassion, and Generosity will be positively associated with one another (convergent validity). Hypothesis 1b: The virtues of Mindfulness and Empathic Compassion will explain variance in the action-related virtue of Generosity beyond that predicted by Big Five personality traits alone (discriminant validity).

Project on the Good Physician: A Proposal for a Moral Intuitionist Model of Virtuous Caring.

Theory: In the Project on the Good Physician, the authors endeavor to advance medical character education by proposing and testing a moral intuitionist model of virtuous caring that may be applicable to physician training. This model proposes that the moral intuition to care/harm motivates students to extend care to those in need.

Hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: Medical students will report stronger preferences for the intuition to Care/harm over other moral intuitions in clinical decision making.

Relevance of the rationalist-intuitionist debate for ethics and professionalism in medical education.

Despite widespread pedagogical efforts to modify discrete behaviors in developing physicians, the professionalism movement has generally shied away from essential questions such as what virtues characterize the good physician, and how are those virtues formed? Although there is widespread adoption of medical ethics curricula, there is still no consensus about the primary goals of ethics education. Two prevailing perspectives dominate the literature, constituting what is sometimes referred to as the "virtue/skill dichotomy". The first perspective argues that teaching ethics is a means of providing physicians with a skill set for analyzing and resolving ethical dilemmas.

Cultural and contextual issues in exemplar research.

This chapter specifically addresses how exemplar methods are especially relevant to examining cultural and contextual issues. Cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous psychologies are discussed in order to highlight how studying actual exemplars in their unique and complex developmental contexts has the potential to identify themes that either differ between or hold constant across distinct peoples and cultures. The chapter addresses basic assumptions of exemplar research and specifics of the method that are sensitive to the incorporation of cultural and contextual influences.