A strength may need another strength.
Research on character often asks which qualities help people and organizations thrive. A persistent puzzle follows: a quality that usually helps can also create difficulties. Confidence may become overbearing. Caution may close off opportunity. Care for others may make it difficult to uphold a necessary boundary.
Bennion’s dissertation brings together virtue ethics, positive psychology, and organizational research to propose a different way of understanding this puzzle. When a strength becomes unhelpful, another capacity may be underdeveloped. Confidence, for example, may need the humility to receive feedback. Care may need the courage to have a difficult conversation.
The Counterbalancing Virtues Model proposes that developing complementary virtues together can preserve their benefits while limiting the problems of imbalance. Its invitation is to broaden your capacities, so that your strengths have the support they need.
Character is something we can practice.
Bennion treats virtues as learnable capacities of character, directed toward morally meaningful aims and expressed in how we think, feel, and act. Values describe what we prioritize; virtues concern how we put character into practice. This makes growth an ongoing process of attention, feedback, and repeated action.
Two dimensions. A wider view of character.
The model organizes virtues by the aims they tend to serve. Two dimensions create four quadrants, with eight clusters positioned within the quadrants and along their boundaries. A cluster can lean strongly in one direction while being more neutral on the other dimension.
- Pragmatic & idealistic
- Pragmatic virtues attend to present realities, practical constraints, and effective action. Idealistic virtues attend to aspirations, future possibilities, and what could be. Realism helps us work with what is here; optimism helps us imagine what might come next.
- Communal & agentic
- Communal virtues emphasize relationships, collaboration, and collective well-being. Agentic virtues emphasize self-direction, individual expression, and the ability to act. Empathy helps us understand another person; conviction helps us take a stand.
In your report, the communal and agentic ends are labeled “collective” and “individual.” These directions organize the map; they do not divide people into mutually exclusive categories. You can express virtues from every part of it.
Four ways strengths can support each other.
Clusters on opposite sides of the model form four proposed counterbalancing pairs. We give the clusters memorable profile names to make them easier to explore. The examples below illustrate how their relationship might look in everyday life.
The Listener & The Trailblazer
Listen with humility. Act with courage.
Humility, patience, and tact alongside conviction, confidence, and courage.
Openness to other people helps conviction remain teachable. Courage helps patience move toward action. The model suggests that developing both can help us speak up with confidence while remaining willing to listen and revise our view.
In practice In a difficult conversation, ask what you may be missing, then say clearly what you believe needs to change.
The Realist & The Dreamer
Stay grounded. Make room for possibility.
Prudence, conventionality, realism, and temperance alongside optimism, creativity, curiosity, and adaptability.
Practical judgment gives imagination a way to become reality. Imagination helps caution remain open to change. Together, these capacities invite us to respect present constraints while continuing to explore what could be different.
In practice When considering a new idea, imagine what it could make possible and identify a small, realistic way to try it.
The Builder & The Lover
Follow through. Care for people.
Diligence, fortitude, and perseverance alongside compassion, forgiveness, and generosity.
Persistence sustains effort when work becomes difficult. Compassion keeps that effort attentive to human needs. The model proposes that care can give achievement a humane direction, while discipline helps generous intentions become dependable action.
In practice When a teammate is struggling, make space to understand the difficulty and agree on a manageable next step together.
The Arbiter & The Friend
Hold to principles. Understand the person.
Honesty, fairness, uprightness, and integrity alongside mercy, kindness, gentleness, and empathy.
Consistent standards help care remain fair. Empathy helps us apply those standards with sensitivity to someone’s circumstances. This pairing asks us to consider both the principle at stake and the person affected by our response.
In practice When someone makes a mistake, explain the standard honestly, listen to what happened, and consider a fair opportunity to make things right.
The situation matters.
The dissertation develops its argument through four illustrative contexts: mediation, military leadership, high finance, and mission-driven work. Each tends to reward certain virtues, making their complementary capacities especially easy to overlook.
A mediator needs patience and tact to make room for people to be heard, along with enough confidence and courage to move a stalled conversation forward. A demanding workplace may encourage extraordinary persistence while leaving compassion underdeveloped. A mission-driven organization may need disciplined follow-through to sustain its generous intentions.
These are theoretical illustrations. They suggest a useful reflection: which qualities does your environment encourage, and which might you need to practice more deliberately?
A question to carry with you
When a familiar strength is no longer helping, what other good quality could help you use it more wisely?
What the research tells us so far.
Chapter 3 reports three preregistered studies examining the organization of 28 virtues. The first two explore how people understand virtues; the third examines how people report those virtues in themselves. Sample sizes below are the final samples after the study exclusions.
- Study 1a 140 participants
- Participants sorted virtue definitions along the two dimensions. Eleven of the twelve cluster–axis relationships with a clear predicted direction aligned with the model.
- Study 1b 133 participants
- Participants rated how closely each virtue reflected each of the four dimension endpoints. Again, eleven of the twelve directional cluster–axis predictions were supported.
- Study 2 377 employed adults
- Participants reported their own virtues and orientations. The spatial arrangement showed modest correspondence with the theory, beyond chance. The proposed eight-cluster structure had mixed statistical fit, providing only marginal support for that structure.
One recurring finding challenges the proposed map: the moral-integrity cluster, which includes honesty and fairness, was more communal than its predicted agentic position suggested. The structure remains open to refinement.
The central claim still needs a direct test.
These studies offer preliminary evidence about how virtues are organized. They do not directly test whether developing counterbalancing pairs produces better outcomes. All three used online samples; the self-report study measured responses at one point in time. The dissertation calls for research across cultures, observations from other people, and studies that track development over time.
Use your results as a starting point.
Counterbalance translates this framework into a tool for personal reflection. Your report shows all eight profiles, their complementary relationships, and your individual virtue scores. Each score describes your responses to the assessment’s statements.
Complementary profiles have independent scores: both can be high, both can be low, or they can differ. Equal scores alone do not establish well-developed character. The useful question is how these capacities show up together in the situations you encounter.
The current assessment includes 29 virtues, adding resilience to The Builder alongside the 28 virtues examined in the dissertation. Its candidate questions and assessment selections have not been independently validated. The research on the model does not establish the validity of this particular assessment.
Treat your results as an invitation to notice patterns, seek feedback from someone who knows you, and choose something concrete to practice. They describe self-reported responses; they do not assign a fixed identity, rank your moral worth, or provide a diagnosis or prediction.
The dissertation behind this page
Bennion, Charles Wridge. (2026). The Counterbalancing Virtues Model: From “Too Much of a Good Thing” to “Not Enough of Another Good Thing.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia.
Chapter 1 reviews the foundations of virtue research. Chapter 2 develops the definition, dimensions, clusters, and practical illustrations. Chapter 3 presents the studies, findings, and limitations summarized here.