Possibilities and challenges for academic psychology - Uncertain science, interpretative conversation, and virtuous community

This article focuses on explicitly expanding contemporary definitions of the academic community and its disciplines, in particular academic psychology, to include virtue. The academy benefits from the civic trust; thus, it has moral obligations to serve the public with integrity and respect. This article places academic psychology in this larger context of the academy and uses the metaphor of the academic conversation for describing tensions between coherence and uncertainty indicative of academic life. Four major virtues of academic psychology that derive from its goals, practices, and distinguishing features are suggested: the self-regarding virtues of prudence and integrity and the other-regarding virtues of respectfulness and benevolence. Several challenges to achieving a virtuous academic psychology are presented. The ideas in this article are not meant to be definitive but rather are intended to provoke further conversation about these matters and their helpfulness in enhancing competent psychological research, instruction, practice, and policy making.