This chapter discusses the contextualization of human traits in social roles. It begins by exploring how personality traits relate to social roles, then it extrapolates those findings related to virtues and discusses theory and research on social roles and virtue traits. The discussion of the social role contextualization is based on identity theory, which explains that social roles are repetitive patterns of action that are included in social structures and result in role identity formation in the individual. The chapter reiterates that up-to-date trait conceptualizations do not view them as simplistic behavioral tendencies that manifest in any social role. Instead, traits are currently understood as influenced by social role expectations. Practical wisdom plays a large part in the expression of virtues through social roles. Practical wisdom adds an element to virtue expression and social roles that is absent in personality research because some individuals see more opportunities for virtue trait expression within a role than others. It then clarifies this theoretical discussion with examples of common role and virtue enactments from the parenting, teaching, and healing roles. It concludes by discussing how a virtue perspective adds important elements (agency, aspiration, and practical wisdom) to the contextualization of traits.

The Introduction discusses paideia (culture of Greek intellectuals) and its relevance for fourth-century clergy by providing a background to the Cappadocian Fathers. The chapter defines the meaning of "classical masculinity" for this study and places its treatment of gender into the broader scholarship on late antiquity and Christianity. The chapter outlines key concepts such as aretē (manly virtue), agathos (superior person), and asceticism (self-denial), and introduces agōn (contest or struggle) as the concept around which the book is organized. It also directs the reader to consider the Second Sophistic as the antecedent to the fourth-century culture of epistolary exhibitions. The chapter explains the differences in the Cappadocians’ use of genre and the distinguishing features of epistolography and hagiographic biography. And the Introduction explores identity theory and its usefulness for investigating gender and Christianity.

The conception of this handbook goes way back, taking us more than five years until completion. It all began with an early plan to organize a symposium for the 31st International Congress of Psychology (ICP) for July 2016 in Yokohama, Japan. The intention was to bring together a group of international identity researchers, from within psychology and from neighboring disciplines, to see whether there were any new developments in identity theory and empirical research, and whether they had a common center or were drifting pieces moving in all kinds of directions (cf., for example, Nochi, 2016, or Watzlawik, 2016). This was the original idea. So, in the summer of 2015 we started contacting researchers we knew (and whom we did not know up to that moment), asking whether they would be interested in joining us for the symposium. Preparing the symposium was as stimulating as the actual gathering that took place on the afternoon of July 28 one year later under the header Identity and Identity Research in Psychology and Neighboring Disciplines. Janka Romero, the Commissioning Editor for Psychology at Cambridge University Press, had contacted us beforehand with the offer to talk about the potential to turn this into a book project, and we, the symposium participants, started following up the same night over dinner – not knowing that this would keep us busy for the next five years. We went through the usual editorial routines: developing a proposal, revising the proposal, and contacting old and new colleagues in the field, up to the point of delivering the full set of manuscripts in January 2021.