Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning (...) the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free-riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a “narrow” and a “wide” reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in “real-world” situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation “in the wild.” In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing. (shrink)

Despite the fact that common sense taxes emotions with irrationality, philosophers have, by and large, celebrated their functionality. They are credited with motivating, steadying, shaping or harmonizing our dispositions to act, and with policing norms of social behaviour. It's time to restore emotion's bad rep. To this end, I shall argue that we should expect that some of the “norms” enforced by emotions will be unevenly distributed among the members of our species, and may be dysfunctional at the individual, social, (...) moral, or even species levels. I”ll adduce three considerations in support of that pessimistic view: The fallacy of adaptive fixation, the moral randomness of group selection, and the lack of fit between “natural norms” set up by evolution and those moral and social norms we would like philosophy to justify. (shrink)

In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named (...) the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today ‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programmes in the light of new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology. (shrink)

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The cultural norms of traditional societies encourage behavior that is consistent with maximizing reproductive success but those of modern post-demographic transition societies do not. Newson et al (2005) proposed that this might be because interaction between kin is relatively less frequent in modern social networks. Assuming that people’s evaluations of reproductive decisions are influenced by a desire to increase their inclusive fitness, they will be inclined to prefer their kin to make fitness-enhancing choices. Such a preference will encourage the emergence (...) of pronatal cultural norms if social networks are dense with kin. Less pronatal norms will emerge if contact between kin makes up a small proportion of social interactions. This article reports evidence based on role-play studies that supports the assumption of the kin influence hypothesis that evaluations of reproductive decisions are influenced by a desire to increase inclusive fitness. It also presents a cultural evolutionary model demonstrating the long-term effect of declining kin interaction if people are more likely to encourage fitness-enhancing choices when interacting with their kin than with nonrelatives. D 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...) small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life. Key Words: altruism; cooperation; cross-cultural research; experimental economics; game theory; ultimatum game; public goods game; self-interest. (shrink)

This paper defends the position that the supposed gap between biological altruism and psychological altruism is not nearly as wide as some scholars (e.g., Elliott Sober) insist. Crucial to this defense is the use of James Mark Baldwin's concepts of “organic selection”and “social heredity” to assist in revealing that the gap between biological and psychological altruism is more of a small lacuna. Specifically, this paper argues that ontogenetic behavioral adjustments, which are crucial to individual survival and reproduction, are also crucial (...) to species survival. In particular, it is argued that human psychological altruism is produced and maintained by various sorts of mimicry and self-reflection in the aid of both individual and species survival. The upshot of this analysis is that it is possible to offer an account of psychological altruism that is closelytethered to biological altruism without reducing entirely the former to thelatter. (shrink)

Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is puzzling. The evolution of altruistic cooperative behavior—in which an organism’s action reduces its fitness and increases the fitness of another organism —only makes sense when it is directed at genetically related organisms or when one can expect the favor to be returned. Therefore, evolutionary theorists such as Sober and Wilson have argued that we should revise Neo-Darwininian evolutionary theory. They argue that human altruism (...) evolved through group selection in which groups of altruists were naturally selected because they had a comparative advantage over other groups. Wilson and Sober’s hypothesis attracted followers but is rejected by most of their peers. The heated debate between advocates and critics of group selection often suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. In response, I set out to clearly distinguish ‘genetic’ from ‘cultural’ group selection and argue that the latter does not face the potentially debilitating problems plaguing the former. I defend the claim that human altruistic dispositions evolved through cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution and offer empirical evidence in support. I also argue that actual altruistic behavior often goes beyond the kind of behavior humans have evolved to display. Conscious and voluntary reasoning processes, I show, have an important role in altruistic behavior. This is often overlooked in the scientific literature on human altruism. (shrink)

Influential thinkers such as Young, Sugden, Binmore, and Skyrms have developed game-theoretic accounts of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. Social contracts are sets of commonly understood rules that govern cooperative social interaction within societies. These naturalistic accounts provide us with valuable and important insights into the foundations of human societies. However, current naturalistic theories focus mainly on how social contracts solve coordination problems in which the interests of the individual participants are aligned, not competition problems in which (...) individual interests compete with group interests. In response, I set out to build on those theories and provide a comprehensive naturalistic account of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. My central claim is that social contracts have culturally evolved to solve cooperation problems, which include both coordination and competition problems. I argue that solutions to coordination problems emerge from “within-group” dynamics, while solutions to competition problems result largely from “between-group” dynamics. (shrink)

Complex systems are to be seen as typically having multiple levels of organization. For instance, in the behavioural and cognitive sciences, there has been a long lasting trend, promoted by the seminal work of David Marr, putting focus on three distinct levels of analysis: the computational level, accounting for the What and Why issues, the algorithmic and the implementational levels specifying the How problem. However, the tremendous developments in neuroscience knowledge about processes at different scales of organization together with the (...) complexity of today cognitive theories suggest that there will hardly be only three levels of explanation. Instead, there will be many different degrees of commitments corresponding to the different granularities—from high-level (behavioural) models to low-level (neural and molecular) models of the cognitive research program. For instance, Bayesian approaches, that are usually advocated for formalizing Marr’s computational level and rational behaviour, have even been adopted to model synaptic plasticity and axon guidance by molecular gradients. As a result, we can consider the behavioural scientist as dealing with models at a multiplicity of levels. The purpose of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology is to promote an approach to the role of the levels and explanation and models which is of interest for cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Strong reciprocity has recently been subject to heated debate. In this debate, the “West camp” :231–262, 2011), which is critical of the case for SR, and the “Laland camp” :1512–1516, 2011, Biol Philos 28:719–745, 2013), which is sympathetic to the case of SR, seem to take diametrically opposed positions. The West camp criticizes advocates of SR for conflating proximate and ultimate causation. SR is said to be a proximate mechanism that is put forward by its advocates as an ultimate explanation (...) of human cooperation. The West camp thus accuses advocates of SR for not heeding Mayr’s original distinction between ultimate and proximate causation. The Laland camp praises advocates of SR for revising Mayr’s distinction. Advocates of SR are said to replace Mayr’s uni-directional view on the relation between ultimate and proximate causes by the bi-directional one of reciprocal causation. The paper argues that both the West camp and the Laland camp misrepresent what advocates of SR are up to. The West camp is right that SR is a proximate cause of human cooperation. But rather than putting forward SR as an ultimate explanation, as the West camp argues, advocates of SR believe that SR itself is in need of ultimate explanation. Advocates of SR tend to take gene-culture co-evolutionary theory as the correct meta-theoretical framework for advancing ultimate explanations of SR. Appearances notwithstanding, gene-culture coevolutionary theory does not imply Laland et al.’s notion of reciprocal causation. “Reciprocal causation” suggests that proximate and ultimate causes interact simultaneously, while advocates of SR assume that they interact sequentially. I end by arguing that the best way to understand the debate is by disambiguating Mayr’s ultimate-proximate distinction. I propose to reserve “ultimate” and “proximate” for different sorts of explanations, and to use other terms for distinguishing different kinds of causes and different parts of the total causal chain producing behavior. (shrink)

Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, along with other philosophers, have argued for a metaethical position, the natural goodness approach, that claims moral evaluations are, or are on a par with, teleological claims made in the biological sciences. Specifically, an organism’s flourishing is characterized by how well they function as specified by the species to which they belong. In this essay, I first sketch the Neo-Aristotelian natural goodness approach. Second, I argue that critics who claim that this sort of approach is (...) inconsistent with evolutionary biology due to its species essentialism are in- correct. Third, I consider the prospects of understanding ethical normativity as a species of biological teleology claiming that this would be incompatible with our considered moral judgments. Fourth, after presenting gene-culture coevolution theory, I argue that the only way of reconciling naturalism and normativity in accordance with the natural goodness approach requires amending the selected effects function account to include cultural evolution. However, this approach, though not biologically reductionistic, still generates claims incompatible with our considered moral judgments. Finally, I end with a discussion of methodology and revisionistic moral theories. (shrink)

Using results from evolutionary game theory, we analyze the conditions under which guilt can provide individual fitness benefits to actors, and so evolve. In particular, we focus on the individual benefits of guilty apology. We find that guilty apology is more likely to evolve in cases where actors interact repeatedly over long periods of time, where the costs of apology are low or moderate, and where guilt is hard to fake.

We offer a new and robust model of the emergence and persistence of cooperation when interactions are anonymous, the population is well mixed, and evolution selects strategies according to material payoffs. The model has a Prisoner’s Dilemma structure, but with an outside option of non-participation. The payoff to mutual cooperation is stochastic; with positive probability, it exceeds that from cheating against a cooperator. Under mild conditions, mutually beneficial cooperation occurs in equilibrium. This is possible because the non-participation option holds down (...) the equilibrium frequency of cheating. Dynamic properties of the model are investigated theoretically and through simulations based on replicator dynamics. (shrink)

Change and variation, while inherent to language, might be seen as running counter to human communicative needs. However, variation also gives language the power to convey reliable indexical information about the speaker. This has been argued to play a significant role in allowing the establishment of large communities based on cooperative exchange , although there has been little experimental investigation of the hypothesis. Here I present a preliminary study intended to help fill this gap. Participants played an online team game (...) in which they negotiated anonymously for resources using an artificial language. Players succeeded in using linguistic cues to distinguish between their teammates and their opponents, and displayed between-team variation in the use of the language. (shrink)

Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation. Here we use cross-cultural (...) survey data from a global sample of 87 countries to show that beliefs about two related sources of supernatural monitoring and punishment — God and the afterlife —independently predict respondents' assessment of the justifiability of a range of moral transgressions. This relationship holds even after controlling for frequency of religious participation, country of origin, religious denomination and level of education. As well as corroborating experimental work, our findings suggest that, across cultural and religious backgrounds, beliefs about the permissibility of moral transgressions are tied to beliefs about supernatural monitoring and punishment, supporting arguments that these beliefs may be important promoters of cooperation in human groups. (shrink)

A cognitive scientific approach to religion reveals the moral role of religion in human evolutionary history and provides insight into the continuing influence of religion in human affairs. While morality can be understood and justified apart from any religious foundation, religion cannot be separated from its moral function. After setting out the evolved cognitive bases of religious beliefs and behaviors, a model for the nexus between religion and morality is developed. From this it follows that religions constitute moral worldviews that (...) emerge from and tap into deep moral and emotional instincts. This makes religion, and moral worldviews more generally, profoundly important, but also makes them dangerously problematic. A case study of the intersection of religion, race, and politics in contemporary American presidential politics will be used to explicate these ideas. Keywords: religion, morality, cognitive science, evolution, worldviews. (shrink)

Some unpleasant emotions, like fear and disgust, appear straightforwardly susceptible to evolutionary explanation on account of the benefits they seem to provide to individuals. But guilt is more puzzling in this respect. Like other unpleasant emotions, guilt is often associated with a host of negative effects on the individual, such as psychological suffering and social withdrawal. Moreover, many guilt-induced behaviors, such as revealing one’s offenses and placing oneself before the mercy of others, could levy a cost to individuals that is (...) not outweighed by guilt’s benefits. Supposing there is an evolutionary story to tell about the origins of guilt, the question is how such negative effects were sufficiently outweighed by the potential fitness payoffs that guilt might have yielded to individuals. In this article, we consider which forms of evolution could have resulted in guilt, and whether current evidence can tell us which form of evolution most likely occurred. (shrink)

Three main motivations can explain compliance with social norms: fear of peer punishment, the desire for others' esteem and the desire to meet others' expectations. Though all play a role, only the desire to meet others' expectations can sustain compliance when neither public nor private monitoring is possible. Theoretical models have shown that such desire can indeed sustain social norms, but empirical evidence is lacking. Moreover it is unclear whether this desire ranges over others' “empirical” or “normative” expectations. We propose (...) a new experimental design to isolate this motivation and to investigate what kind of expectations people are inclined to meet. Results indicate that, when nobody can assign either material or immaterial sanctions, the perceived legitimacy of others' normative expectations can motivate a significant number of people to comply with costly social norms. (shrink)

Collective action, or the large-scale cooperation in the pursuit of public goods, has been suggested to have evolved through cultural group selection. Previous research suggests that the costly punishment of group members who do not contribute to public goods plays an important role in the resolution of collective action dilemmas. If large-scale cooperation sustained by the punishment of defectors has evolved through the mechanism of cultural group selection, two implications regarding costly punishment follow: (1) that people are more willing to (...) punish defecting group members in a situation of intergroup competition than in a single-group social dilemma game and (2) that levels of “perverse” punishment of cooperators are not affected by intergroup competition. We find confirmation for these hypotheses. However, we find that the effect of intergroup competition on the punishment of defectors is fully explained by the stronger conditionality of punishment on expected punishment levels in the competition condition. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the way that cultures change and how cultural diversity is created, maintained and lost. Human culture is the inevitable result of the way our species acquires its behavior. We are extremely social animals and an overwhelming proportion of our behavior is socially learned. The behavior of other animals is largely a product of innate evolved determinants of behavior combined with individual learning. They make quite modest use of social learning while we acquire a massive cultural repertoire (...) from the people we associate with (Richerson & Boyd, 2005: Chapter 2). Expertise in exploiting our environment, values about what matters in life and even feelings about whom to trust and whom to hate are mostly “absorbed” from those around us. (shrink)

We describe the results of an experiment testing for the presence of strong altruism among Christians in New Zealand. The study examined anonymous participant generosity to cohort. We found that in modified dictator games, anonymous Christians in New Zealand gave significantly more to Canadian Christians than anonymous New Zealand citizens gave to their fellow citizens. The gifting opportunities occurred after anonymous benefactors observed recipients willingly undertake costly acts of group commitment. We found that mean gifting after witnessing a fellow group (...) member metaphorically "fall on a hand grenade" to punish a member of an out-group was almost four times greater in the Christian group than it was in the New Zealand control. Our data support the hypothesis that religious altruism exists and is especially strong among Christians in New Zealand. The data also weakly support a multi-level selection hypothesis for the evolution of religious altruism. (shrink)

A cross-cultural analysis of trust and cooperation networks in Northern Ghana (NGHA) and Oaxaca (OAX) was carried out by means of ego networks and interviews. These regions were chosen because both are inhabited by several ethnic groups, thus providing a good opportunity to test the cultural group selection hypothesis. Against the predictions of this approach, we found that in both regions cooperation is grounded in personal trust groups, and that social cohesion depends on these emotional bonds. Moreover, in agreement with (...) Fiske's notion of “evolved proclivities”, we also found two distinct kinds of trust networks, one for each region, which vary in terms of the degree of ethnic interrelation. This pattern suggests that social cohesion increases when environmental resources are scarce. (shrink)

The evolution and maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies challenge various disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology to anthropology, social sciences, and economics. In social interactions, cooperators increase the welfare of the group at some cost to themselves whereas defectors attempt to free ride and neither provide benefits nor incur costs. The problem of cooperation becomes even more pronounced when increasing the number of interacting individuals. Punishment and voluntary participation have been identified as possible factors to support cooperation and (...) prevent cheating. Typically, punishment behavior is unable to gain a foothold in a population, while volunteering alone can efficiently prevent deadlocks in states of mutual defection but is unable to stabilize cooperation. The combined effects of the two mechanisms have surprisingly different consequences in finite and infinite populations. Here we provide a detailed comparison of the two scenarios and demonstrate that driven by the inherent stochasticity of finite populations, the possibility to abstain from social interactions plays a pivotal role, which paves the way for the establishment of cooperation and punishment. (shrink)