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Chuck Huff

Chuck Huff

Professor of Psychology

St. Olaf College

Chuck Huff is a professor of psychology at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. His work focuses on social and moral psychology, including the moral development of computing professionals.

Published Articles

Article

Modeling Virtue: In Which a Social Psychologist Decides He Can Do Good Without Freely Choosing It

Chuck Huff

No. 9 · Summer 2000

Huff, recalling his 1975 sophomore disillusionment with a sterile introductory psychology in South Georgia (and Danny Saunders’s question from The Chosen), defends a scientific psychology as model-making rather than meaning-finding, traces the collapse of Lawrence Kohlberg’s totalizing theory of moral development into chastened mini-theories, and presents William Damon and Anne Colby’s interview study of twenty-three “moral exemplars” whose lives were marked by self-good unity, constant self-examination in community, a felt inability to have done otherwise, religious grounding, and genuine happiness. Following Aristotle on virtue as learned habit and the Christian tradition of the “slave for Christ,” he concludes that goodness flows from the choice of constraints rather than from the lone free-will hero of fairy tales, complicating C. P. Snow’s two-cultures divide. Originally the 1998 Mellby Lecture at St. Olaf.
Reflection

Confessions of a Collaborator

Chuck Huff

No. 3 · Summer 1997

Huff of St. Olaf offers a tongue-in-cheek public confession of his lifelong sin of collaboration—from elementary-school reports on dinosaurs and Cliff notes on Faulkner, through high-school algebra and college group projects, to borrowed syllabi, group work imposed on resentful students, tutorials, independent studies on every form of self-reliance, and circulated drafts. Even this confession was collaborated on, and (he confesses) he enjoyed it.
Response

On the Outside Looking Out: A Personal and Social Psychological Response

Chuck Huff

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Huff of St. Olaf—a self-described “Metho-Bap-terian” from the South educated at Bob Jones University—offers a personal response to Bouman’s themes (welcoming the rejection of biblical inerrancy, the distinction between gospel and scripture in the homosexuality debate, the gospel-in-the-creeds reading that releases him from Hellenistic conundrums, and the recasting of justification by faith as meaning rather than insurance policy) and a social-psychological response in which a planned study of campus social networks at St. Olaf was discontinued when preliminary interviews revealed that everyone—storied Lutherans, secular faculty, feminists, fundamentalists—felt like outsiders. Continuing the tradition requires constructing a conversation that is thoughtful, fair, inclusive, charitable, focussed, and still true to the tradition.

Chuck Huff

Published Articles

Modeling Virtue: In Which a Social Psychologist Decides He Can Do Good Without Freely Choosing It

Confessions of a Collaborator

On the Outside Looking Out: A Personal and Social Psychological Response