French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin created innovative, enduring paintings and sculptures set on Tahiti and other Pacific islands, but he had to leave his family to pursue his art.
He also impregnated and abandoned multiple young teens, shattered his ankle in a drunken brawl and at least once was photographed at a party playing the harmonium without pants - an example, psychology researcher Jordan Wylie said, of someone who lived as his true self while neglecting moral obligations and norms.
"Gauguin pushed aside the moral obligations people generally believe are the most important to pursue his art," said Wylie, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. "Research consistently finds that everyday people see morality as most central to the true self, but that does not fit well with these eccentric people in the art world."
Nor does it fit well with how everyday people balance morality with other values, Wylie finds in new moral psychology research. In experiments, Wylie and two collaborators - one in psychology and one in philosophy - found that people see a tension between moral pursuits - living a good, just life - and personal authenticity -expressing the truest self. In their own lives, people resolve this tension by investing in a range of pursuits - not just moral but also aesthetic, relational, civic and leisure. Artistic excellence, in particular, offers greater access to one's true self than moral excellence, in part because aesthetic pursuits are seen as less rule-bound.
Their findings, "People Can Find Their True Selves Outside Moral Pursuits," appear in the February 2026 issue of Cognition. Wylie is the corresponding author with co-authors Matthew Lindauer and Ana Gantman of Brooklyn College.
"Thinking about Gauguin and broadly, it doesn't fit that morality - all these rules and obligations - would be the kind of thing which allows people to be their free, truest selves," Wylie said. "Pulling on that thread is exactly what we were trying to do in these studies."
While psychology research generally avoids telling people how to live, empirical literature suggests that most people think that, in theory, the path of moral excellence is the better one to take, Wylie said - what she and collaborators call the moral primacy view. Some philosophy literature also holds up moral primacy, she said.
But the collaborators wondered: When it comes to making choices for their own lives, do most people really prioritize moral excellence, even at the expense of other interests? Or might they prefer a "value pluralist" approach, including a variety of interests and values?
In one experiment, participants divided a pie chart to represent how much time people would allocate to each of five areas - morality; aesthetics and intellectual pursuits; civic engagement; leisure; and relationships - in an ideal society and in their own lives.
The participants allocated the most time to relationships while morality and aesthetic pursuits received roughly the same amount of time. Civic engagement received the least.
"We were interested in how people would allocate those values and whether morality would take up a larger portion of the pie in relation to the others," Wylie said. It did not.
When asked whether any of those pursuits involved rule-breaking, participants considered aesthetic/intellectual spaces to have more rule-breaking involved than the moral domain. This helped the researchers focus in on the contrast between moral and aesthetic domains in subsequent studies, which pitted a life of moral pursuit directly against a life of artistic pursuit.
Across studies, participants considered hypothetical people who either lost the capacity for art or chose to pursue art excellence. In both cases, artistic change mattered at least as much as moral change for judgments of the true self, showing that "lives devoted exclusively to moral goals may lack the freedom and richness that many find fulfilling," Wylie said.
Instead, people find that artistic pursuits provide one space to break rules and act with autonomy - a key part of living as the true self.
The aesthetic domain is a rich one to contrast with morality, Wylie said. The history of this contrast in philosophy is fruitful because features of these two domains are often at odds with one another - as they were for Gauguin.
"To pursue art often means you can't pursue a moral good, at least not in that moment," she said. "Of course, it's true that over a lifespan, a person can pursue both. Perhaps pursuing excellence across many domains is the key to a fulfilled life."
Support for this study came from the National Science Foundation, the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding and the Professional Staff Congress, City University of New York.
Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.
