Anne Colby

Consulting Professor at Stanford and Co-author of The Power of Ideals.

Anne Colby is Consulting Professor at Stanford University. Prior to that, she was director of the Henry Murray Research Center at Harvard University and then Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She is co-author of The Power of Ideals: The Real Story of Moral Choice (2015), The Measurement of Moral Judgment; Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment; Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility; Educating Lawyers; Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement; Educating Engineers: Designing for the Future of the Field; and Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession*.

Colby is also co-editor of Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Human Inquiry; Competence and Character through Life; and Looking at Lives: American Longitudinal Studies of the Twentieth Century. A life-span developmental psychologist, Colby holds a B.A. from McGill University and a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.

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Philosopher's Notes on Anne Colby's Books

LockedPhilosopher's Notes

The Power of Ideals

by William Damon and Anne Colby

William Damon and Anne Colby are two of the world’s leading researchers in the field of moral psychology. They’re both Professors at Stanford and have been married for 30+ years. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that challenges the “new science of morality”’s view that morality is essentially biologically and socially determined. Damon and Colby argue that we all have the power to cultivate our more noble, moral possibilities. Big Ideas we explore include a quick look at our moral exemplars, moral agency, and the three virtues we want to cultivate: Truth + Humility + Faith.

Quotes by Anne Colby

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Our ultimate hope with this book is that it will validate efforts to improve moral choice and encourage moral commitment.

William Damon & Anne Colby

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Although we recognize the role that gut responses can play, we reject extreme positions of biological determinism that characterize the entire human moral sense as driven by nonconscious responses.

William Damon & Anne Colby

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When individuals are described as persons of integrity, this generally means that moral values and goals are central to who they are and, at least as important, it means that they don’t often rationalize their violations of those values in order to let themselves off the hook. The avoidance of rationalization (which we call inner truthfulness) is widely recognized as a central feature of strong moral character.

William Damon & Anne Colby

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Benjamin Franklin wrote, ‘In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, it is still alive... For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility.’

William Damon & Anne Colby

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This is a central thread of world wisdom throughout the ages. Fulfillment and peace of mind come not from trying to create the most attractive possible self but from taking the focus off the self: not thinking less of oneself, but thinking of oneself less.

William Damon & Anne Colby