The moral psychology of emulation through entangled <i>phronesis</i>

Whilst philosophical argument remains the gold standard<br/>regarding what one can aspire to argue for normatively, to have<br/>interdisciplinary credibility and potential impact in real-world<br/>contexts, theory must be answerable to empirical evidence.<br/>Taking heed of this maxim, this paper expounds a new neo-<br/>Aristotelian theory of emulation qua moral role modelling by<br/>synthesising a previous philosophical argument with insights<br/>from current developmental moral psychology and neuroscience.<br/>By advancing three hypotheses derived from the aforementioned<br/>argument, I argue that emulation is a two-phase process of moral<br/>virtue and phronesis (practical wisdom) development, where pre-phronetic<br/>‘habituated emulation’ evolves into phronetically-informed<br/>‘complete emulation’. Through doing so, I further<br/>establish the centrality of phronesis to the emulative process by<br/>refining how the psycho-moral mechanism of ‘entangled<br/>phronesis’ drives it. Representing the aligned moral-psychological<br/>states of role model and learner, I make clear how entangled<br/>phronesis stimulates emulation by enabling complex normative<br/>information to be shared and acquired through a<br/>developmentally sensitive combination of modelled virtuous<br/>action, verbal reason-giving and non-verbal mind reading.