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Publications (32)
Background: Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth? Methods: To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory stud...
Rising hostility between members of opposing political factions has gained considerable attention in both academic and popular press. The adverse effects of this phenomenon are widely recognized, but its psychological antecedents remain the focus of ongoing debate in political psychology. Past research has honed in on two conflicting explanations:...
Is animal culture a real entity or is it rather just in the eye of the beholder? The concept of culture began to be increasingly used in the context of animal behaviour research around the 1960s. Despite its success, it is not clear that it represents what philosophers have traditionally thought to be a natural kind. In this article I will show, ho...
Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior (sometimes called “teaching”) can be seen as a costly strategy: one for which its evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin selection-based proposals for the evol...
En el terreno de la moral, el contraste entre lo que el filósofo Wilfrid Sellars denominó "la imagen manifiesta" y la "imagen científica" es enorme y tiene unas consecuencias prácticas ineludibles. En la imagen manifiesta se albergan una serie de ideas comunes y cotidianas que a menudo se tienen sobre qué es la moral, cómo suele actuarse en situaci...
Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this article provides evide...
People vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, impacting a range of social and political phenomena. People also vary in the degree to which they perceive disparate dangers as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions likely regularly offered direct and indirect avenues for addressing hazar...
Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this research report provid...
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00559-0
Background:
Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?
Methods:
To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory s...
Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 researc...
Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.
Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior (sometimes called "teaching") can be seen as a costly strategy: one for which its evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin selection-based proposals for the evol...
Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vo...
Research on moral judgment with moral dilemmas suggests that "utilitarian" responses (UR) to sacrificial high-conflict dilemmas are due to decreased harm aversion, not only in individuals with clinical conditions, but also in healthy participants with high scores in antisocial personality traits. We investigated the patterns of responses to differe...
For scientific theories grounded in empirical data, replicability is a core principle, for at least two reasons. First, unless we accept to have scientific theories rest on the authority of a small number of researchers, empirical studies should be replicable, in the sense that its methods and procedure should be detailed enough for someone else to...
For scientific theories grounded in empirical data, replicability is a core principle, for at least two reasons. First, unless we accept to have scientific theories rest on the authority of a small number of researchers, empirical studies should be replicable, in the sense that its methods and procedure should be detailed enough for someone else to...
Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical fin...
Although we are sensitive to the advantages of reactive attitudes as a starting point, we are concerned that confusion on the level of analysis can easily plague this type of account. We argue that what is needed here is a serious appraisal of the effects on the promotion of values of moralistic responses toward different types of agency.
Les sciences cognitives peuvent-elles contribuer à éclairer des questions classiques en sciences sociales ? C'est la question à laquelle le présent chapitre tente de répondre, en cherchant à montrer l'utilité des recherches en sciences cognitives pour la compréhension de certains phénomènes sociaux, et en particulier la coopération et la transmissi...
Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side-effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explai...
Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior can be seen as a costly strategy, one whose evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin-selection based theories for the evolution of cultural capacities. We explic...
Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either est...
Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurringwithin groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to
overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either esta...
A series of studies have found an association between the content of beliefs in the supernatural and increased cooperation in social groups. " High Moralizing Gods, " " fear of supernatural punishment, " and " supernatural monitoring " have been claimed to permit greater social cohesion through the specific epistemic engagement they produce in the...
After raising some doubts for cultural group selection as an explanation of prosocial religiosity, we propose an alternative that views it as a “greenbeard effect.” We combine the dynamic constraints on the evolution of greenbeard effects with Iannaccone's (1994) account of strict sects. Our model shows that certain social conditions may foster cre...
Social behavior in most human societies is characterized by the following of moral rules explicitly justified by religious belief systems. These systems constitute the diverse domain of human sacred values. Supernatural entities as founders or warranty of moral principles may be seen as a form of "conversation stoppers," considerations that can be...
Communication par affiche dans un congrès, Barcelona, 21-22 nov. 2008
effort. In using the dichotomous key, we had to disregard the clear social and ecological contributions for most foraging behaviors (Mann & Sargeant 2003; Sargeant et al. 2007) and assume no exclusively genetic causes (e.g., Krü tzen et al. 2005). Six foraging behaviors fit the criteria for innovation and several were inconclusive. Using Reader & L...
