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  1. Nativism and the Evolutionary Debunking of Morality.Brendan Cline - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2):231-253.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to undercut the justification of our moral judgments by showing why a tendency to make moral judgments would evolve regardless of the truth of those judgments. Machery and Mallon (2010. Evolution of morality. In J.M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group (Eds.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (pp. 3-46). Oxford: Oxford University Press) have recently tried to disarm these arguments by showing that moral cognition – in the sense that is relevant to debunking – is not (...)
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  • Recalibrating evolutionary debunking.Justis Koon - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):456-478.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that, if moral realism is true, all of our moral beliefs are unjustified. In this paper, I respond to two of the most enduring objections that have been raised against these arguments. The first objection claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are self-undermining, because they cannot be formulated without invoking epistemic principles, and epistemic principles are just as vulnerable to debunking as our moral beliefs. I argue that this objection suffers from several defects, the most (...)
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  • The Reputational Benefits of Intellectual Humility.Mia Karabegovic & Hugo Mercier - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (2):483-498.
    Much work on intellectual humility has focused on its epistemic benefits. We suggest that displaying (or failing to display) intellectual humility also has effects on how others perceive us and that, as a result, intellectual humility can serve reputation management purposes, in at least four ways: (i) Intellectual humility can be used to signal we are a good source of information; (ii) Intellectual humility can be used to signal we are competent through countersignaling; (iii) Intellectual humility can be used to (...)
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  • Sensorimotor communication fosters trust and generosity: The role of effort and signal utility.Luke McEllin & John Michael - 2022 - Cognition 224:105066.
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  • The epistemology of evolutionary debunking.Justis Koon - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12155-12176.
    Fifteen years ago, Sharon Street and Richard Joyce advanced evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, which purported to show that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes moral realism untenable. These arguments have since given rise to a flurry of objections; the epistemic principles Street and Joyce relied upon, in particular, have come in for a number of serious challenges. My goal in this paper is to develop a new account of evolutionary debunking which avoids the pitfalls Street and (...)
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  • Cognitive Pathways to Belief in Karma and Belief in God.Cindel J. M. White, Aiyana K. Willard, Adam Baimel & Ara Norenzayan - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (1):e12935.
    Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross‐culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans' intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God—an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma—another culturally widespread but ostensibly non‐agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high‐powered samples, including mostly (...)
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  • The Co-evolution of Honesty and Strategic Vigilance.Christophe Heintz, Mia Karabegovic & Andras Molnar - 2016 - Frontiers in Psychology 7:186680.
    We hypothesize that when honesty is not motivated by selfish goals, it reveals social preferences that have evolved for convincing strategically vigilant partners that one is a person worth cooperating with. In particular, we explain how the patterns of dishonest behavior observed in recent experiments can be motivated by preferences for social and self-esteem. These preferences have evolved because they are adaptive in an environment where it is advantageous to be selected as a partner by others and where these others (...)
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  • Children's evaluations of third-party responses to unfairness: Children prefer helping over punishment.Young-eun Lee & Felix Warneken - 2020 - Cognition 205 (C):104374.
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  • In Defense of Ordinary Moral Character Judgment.Evan Westra - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1461-1479.
    Moral character judgments pervade our everyday social interactions. But are these judgments epistemically reliable? In this paper, I discuss a challenge to the reliability of ordinary virtue and vice attribution that emerges from Christian Miller’s Mixed Traits theory of moral character, which entails that the majority of our ordinary moral character judgments are false. In response to this challenge, I argue that a key prediction of this theory is not borne out by the available evidence; this evidence further suggests that (...)
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  • Big History, Value, and the Art of Continued Existence.Brendan Cline - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (3):901-930.
    There has lately been substantial interest in scrutinizing our evaluative attitudes in light of our evolutionary history. However, these discussions have been hampered by an insufficiently expansive vantage. Our history did not begin ex nihilo a few million years ago with the appearance of hominins, or apes, or primates—those are very recent chapters of a much larger story that spans billions of years. This paper situates the mechanisms underlying normative thought within this broader context. I argue that this historical perspective (...)
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  • Lucky or clever? From expectations to responsibility judgments.Tobias Gerstenberg, Tomer D. Ullman, Jonas Nagel, Max Kleiman-Weiner, David A. Lagnado & Joshua B. Tenenbaum - 2018 - Cognition 177 (C):122-141.
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  • Ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation: A minimalist model.Pascal Boyer - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e323.
    Ownership is universal and ubiquitous in human societies, yet the psychology underpinning ownership intuitions is generally not described in a coherent and computationally tractable manner. Ownership intuitions are commonly assumed to derive from culturally transmitted social norms, or from a mentally represented implicit theory. While the social norms account is entirelyad hoc, the mental theory requires prior assumptions about possession and ownership that must be explained. Here I propose such an explanation, arguing that the intuitions result from the interaction of (...)
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  • Morality, Risk-Taking and Psychopathic Tendencies: An Empirical Study.Sam Cacace, Joseph Simons-Rudolph & Veljko Dubljević - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Research in empirical moral psychology has consistently found negative correlations between morality and both risk-taking, as well as psychopathic tendencies. However, prior research did not sufficiently explore intervening or moderating factors. Additionally, prior measures of moral preference have a pronounced lack of ecological validity. This study seeks to address these two gaps in the literature. First, this study used Preference for Precepts Implied in Moral Theories, which offers a novel, more nuanced and ecologically valid measure of moral judgment. Second, the (...)
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  • Psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution.Nicolas Baumard - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42:1-47.
    Since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have experienced high and sustained rates of economic growth. Recent explanations of this sudden and massive change in economic history have held that modern growth results from an acceleration of innovation. But it is unclear why the rate of innovation drastically accelerated in England in the eighteenth century. An important factor might be the alteration of individual preferences with regard to innovation resulting from the unprecedented living standards of the English during that period, for (...)
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  • Moral rigidity as a proximate facilitator of group cohesion and combativeness.Antoine Marie - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42:e130.
    De Dreu and Gross's description of the proximate mechanisms conditioning success in intergroup conflict omits humans' deontological morality. Drawing on research on sacralization and moral objectivism, I show how “moral rigidity” may have evolved through partner selection mechanisms to foster coalitions’ cohesion and combativeness in intergroup conflict.
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  • Kinds of norms.Elizabeth O'Neill - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (5):e12416.
    This article provides an overview of recent, empirically supported categorization schemes that have been proposed to distinguish different kinds of norms. Amongst these are the moral–conventional distinction and divisions within moral norms such as those proposed by moral foundations theory. I identify several dimensions along which norms have been and could usefully be categorized. I discuss some of the most prominent norm categorization proposals and the aims of these existing categorization schemes. I propose that we take a pluralistic approach toward (...)
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  • The Goldberg Exaptation Model: Integrating Adaptation and By-Product Theories of Religion.Taylor Davis - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3):687-708.
    The literature on the evolution of religion has been divided by a fundamental debate between adaptation theories, which explain religious traits as products of selection for religion, and byproduct theories, which explain religious traits as products of selection for other, non-religious functions. Recently, however, a new position has emerged in this debate, as an influential new theory based on cultural selection claims to integrate adaptation theories with byproduct theories, yielding a single, unified account. I argue that the proponents of this (...)
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  • What’s wrong with morality?William H. B. McAuliffe - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (7):1083-1086.
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  • Expression unleashed: The evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication.Christophe Heintz & Thom Scott-Phillips - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e1.
    Human expression is open-ended, versatile, and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how expression is unleashed in humans. The relevant (...)
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  • How Moral Facts Cause Moral Progress.Andrés Luco - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (4):429-448.
    Morally progressive social changes seem to have taken place with the onset of democratic governance, the abolition of slavery, the rise of gender equality, and other developments. This essay attempts to demonstrate that natural and objective moral facts are a plausible cause of some morally progressive social changes. Since this hypothesis is a version of naturalistic moral realism, I call it the Naturalist-Realist Hypothesis. To support the NRH, I argue that objective moral facts are natural facts pertaining to the impartial (...)
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  • Fairness, more than any other cognitive mechanism, is what explains the content of folk-economic beliefs.Nicolas Baumard, Coralie Chevallier & Jean-Baptiste André - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
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  • (1 other version)Moral Reputation: An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective.Dan Sperber & Nicolas Baumard - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (5):495-518.
    From an evolutionary point of view, the function of moral behaviour may be to secure a good reputation as a co-operator. The best way to do so may be to obey genuine moral motivations. Still, one's moral reputation maybe something too important to be entrusted just to one's moral sense. A robust concern for one's reputation is likely to have evolved too. Here we explore some of the complex relationships between morality and reputation both from an evolutionary and a cognitive (...)
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  • When and Why People Evaluate Negative Reciprocity as More Fair Than Positive Reciprocity.Alex Shaw, Anam Barakzai & Boaz Keysar - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (8):e12773.
    If you are kind to me, I am likely to reciprocate and doing so feels fair. Many theories of social exchange assume that such reciprocity and fairness are well aligned with one another. We argue that this correspondence between reciprocity and fairness is restricted to interpersonal dyads and does not govern more complex multilateral interactions. When multiple people are involved, reciprocity leads to partiality, which may be seen as unfair by outsiders. We report seven studies, conducted with people from the (...)
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  • What is seen and what is not seen in the economy: An effect of our evolved psychology.Pascal Boyer & Michael Bang Petersen - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e191.
    Specific features of our evolved cognitive architecture explain why some aspects of the economy are “seen” and others are “not seen.” Drawing from the commentaries of economists, psychologists, and other social scientists on our original proposal, we propose a more precise model of the acquisition and spread of folk-beliefs about the economy. In particular, we try to provide a clearer delimitation of the field of folk-economic beliefs (sect. R2) and to dispel possible misunderstandings of the role of variation in evolutionary (...)
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  • The Coexistence of Different Explanatory Models of Misfortune: A Case from Serbia.Danijela Jerotijević - 2015 - Human Affairs 25 (3):261-275.
    The paper discusses two concepts of supernatural explanations of misfortune and how they co-exist in a particular socio-cultural environment. The author argues that these two concepts are used differently depending on the position of the person evaluating them. While the concept of supernatural harm is usually used in “first person” narratives, the concept of God’s punishment is used by community members as a warning to all wrongdoers and cheats. Searching for the external source of problems is important for personal self-esteem, (...)
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  • Children’s collaboration induces fairness rather than generosity.John Corbit, Katherine McAuliffe, Tara C. Callaghan, Peter R. Blake & Felix Warneken - 2017 - Cognition 168 (C):344-356.
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  • A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference.Jared Vasil, Paul B. Badcock, Axel Constant, Karl Friston & Maxwell J. D. Ramstead - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:480375.
    Recent theoretical work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with those of other individuals. One way this manifests is in cooperative communication ; that is, intentional communication aimed at aligning individuals’ mental states with respect to events in their shared environment. This idea has received strong empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to extend this account by proposing an integrative model of the biobehavioral dynamics of cooperative communication. Our formulation is based (...)
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  • What evidence is required to determine whether infants infer the kinship of third parties? A commentary on Spokes and Spelke.Joseph Billingsley, Beverly Boos & Debra Lieberman - 2019 - Cognition 191 (C):103976.
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  • Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies.Edgar Dubourg & Nicolas Baumard - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13:786770.
    Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for another (...)
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  • Rationalization may improve predictability rather than accuracy.P. Kyle Stanford, Ashley J. Thomas & Barbara W. Sarnecka - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43.
    We present a theoretical and an empirical challenge to Cushman's claim that rationalization is adaptive because it allows humans to extract more accurate beliefs from our non-rational motivations for behavior. Rationalization sometimes generates more adaptive decisions by making our beliefs about the world less accurate. We suggest that the most important adaptive advantage of rationalization is instead that it increases our predictability as potential partners in cooperative social interactions.
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  • Science as a moral system.Stefaan Blancke - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-18.
    Science is a collaborative effort to produce knowledge. Scientists thus must assess what information is trustworthy and who is a competent and honest source and partner. Facing the problem of trust, we can expect scientists to be vigilant. In response to their peers’ vigilance scientists will provide reasons, not only to convince their colleagues to adopt their practices or beliefs, but also to demonstrate that their beliefs and practices are justified. By justifying their beliefs and practices, scientists also justify themselves. (...)
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  • Conflicting influences of justice motivations on moral judgments.Keith J. Yoder & Jean Decety - 2020 - Cognition and Emotion 34 (4):670-683.
    Some early work in economics built on the assumption that people are mostly motivated by self-interest. However, there is much converging evidence from behavioural economics, anthropology, and psyc...
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  • (1 other version)Moral Reputation: An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective.Nicolas Baumard Dan Sperber - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (5):495-518.
    From an evolutionary point of view, the function of moral behaviour may be to secure a good reputation as a co‐operator. The best way to do so may be to obey genuine moral motivations. Still, one's moral reputation maybe something too important to be entrusted just to one's moral sense. A robust concern for one's reputation is likely to have evolved too. Here we explore some of the complex relationships between morality and reputation both from an evolutionary and a cognitive (...)
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  • Do Infants in the First Year of Life Expect Equal Resource Allocations?Melody Buyukozer Dawkins, Stephanie Sloane & Renée Baillargeon - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10:417740.
    Recent research has provided converging evidence, using multiple tasks, of sensitivity to fairness in the second year of life. In contrast, findings in the first year have been mixed, leaving it unclear whether young infants possess an expectation of fairness. The present research examined the possibility that young infants might expect windfall resources to be divided equally between similar recipients, but might demonstrate this expectation only under very simple conditions. In three violation-of-expectation experiments, 9-month-olds (N = 120) expected an experimenter (...)
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  • Question framing effects and the processing of the moral–conventional distinction.Francesco Margoni & Luca Surian - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (1):76-101.
    Prominent theories in moral psychology maintain that a core aspect of moral competence is the ability to distinguish moral norms, which derive from universal principles of justice and fairness, from conventional norms, which are contingent on a specific group consensus. The present study investigated the psychological bases of the moral-conventional distinction by manipulating the framing of the test question, the authority’s license, and the historical context. Participants evaluated moral and conventional transgressions by answering an ‘okay for you’ test question (i.e., (...)
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  • The Most Demanding Moral Capacity: Could Evolution Provide Any Base?Teresa Bejarano - 2022 - Isidorianum 31 (2):91-126.
    The attempts to make moral and evolution compatible have assimilated moral capacity either with complex self-control in favour of one’s own goals or with spontaneous altruism. Those attempts face an easy problem, since those two senses of moral are adaptively advantageous resources. But let us focus on the decisions made in favour of another person which the subject, when making them, feels are contrary to his own goals: Could a base for this capacity arise in evolution, however poor and weak? (...)
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  • “Self-sacrifice” as an accidental outcome of extreme within-group mutualism.Antoine Marie - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
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