Where did aspiration go?

Abstract: Recently, psychology has begun to study increasingly value-laden subjects, such as wisdom (Sternberg & Glück, 2019) and moral education (Nucci et al., 2014), and to attempt to integrate these with educational programs. In reviewing this literature, we believe we have identified a notable lacuna: the topic of personal aspiration. We introduce aspiration as defined by Agnes Callard in the self-transformation literature in philosophy and observe that the discussion of aspiration as a core component of the development of wisdom and virtue appears to be currently limited to discussions of exemplars. We argue that this sidelining of aspiration in comparison to traditional spiritual and philosophical models is a direct consequence of the history of psychology. We end by arguing that reintegrating aspiration into psychological research will be imperative for these fields in the coming years.

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Kim, J. J., & Ferrari, M. (2025). Where did aspiration go?. The Humanistic Psychologist.