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Publications (151)
We applaud Boyer's attempt to ground the psychology of ownership partly in a cooperative logic. In this commentary, we propose to go further and ground the psychology of ownership solely in a cooperative logic. The predictions of bargaining theory, we argue, completely contradict the actual features of ownership intuitions. Ownership is only about...
A portrait is an exercise of impression management: the sitter can choose the impression she or he wants to create in the eyes of others’: competence, trustworthiness, dominance, etc. Indirectly, this choice informs us about the qualities that were specifically valued at the time the portrait was created. In a previous paper, we have shown that cue...
Standard approaches to cultural evolution focus on the recipients or consumers. This does not take into account the fitness costs incurred in producing the behaviors or artifacts that become cultural, i.e., widespread in a social group. We argue that cultural evolution models should focus on these fitness costs and benefits of cultural production p...
What explains the ubiquity and cultural success of prosocial religions? Leading accounts argue that prosocial religions evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that prosocial religious beliefs are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we pr...
Institutions explain humans’ exceptional levels of cooperation. Yet institutions are at the mercy of the very problem they are designed to solve. They are themselves cooperative enterprises, so to say that institutions stabilize cooperation just begs the question: what stabilizes institutions? Here, we use a mathematical model to show that reputati...
Imaginary worlds are present and often central in many of the most culturally successful modern narrative fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter ), movies (e.g., Star Wars ), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda ), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece ) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones ). We propose that imaginary worlds are popular because...
The Scientific Revolution represents a turning point in the history of humanity. Yet it remains ill-understood, partly because of a lack of quantification. Here, we leverage large datasets of individual biographies (N = 22943) and present the first estimates of scientific production during the late medieval and early modern period (1300 - 1850). Ou...
We use an evolutionary approach to explain the existence and design features of human moral cognition. Because humans are under selection to appear as good cooperative investments, they face a trade-off between maximizing the immediate gains of each social interaction and maximizing its long-term reputational benefits. In a simplified game, we show...
Commentators raise fundamental questions about the notion of purity (sect. R1), the architecture of moral cognition (sect. R2), the functional relationship between morality and cooperation (sect. R3), the role of folk-theories of self-control in moral judgement (sect. R4), and the cultural variation of morality (sect. R5). In our response, we addre...
Studies have shown that people hold a number of stereotypes associated with wealth, wherein individuals of higher socio-economic status are often perceived as more competent, yet less warm. These wealth-based stereotypes can be activated by a diverse range of cues, such as clothing, accents, food preferences or facial expressions. The effects of th...
We review recent evidence that game rules, rules of etiquette, and supernatural beliefs, that the authors see as ‘ritualistic’ conventions, are in fact shaped by instrumental inference. In line with such examples, we contend that cultural practices that may appear, from the outside, to be devoid of instrumental utility, could in fact be selectively...
We received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary so...
We review recent evidence that game rules, rules of etiquette, and supernatural beliefs, that the authors see as “ritualistic” conventions, are in fact shaped by instrumental inference. In line with such examples, we contend that cultural practices that may appear, from the outside, to be devoid of instrumental utility, could in fact be selectively...
We review recent evidence that game rules, rules of etiquette, and supernatural beliefs, that the authors see as ‘ritualistic’ conventions, are in fact shaped by instrumental inference. In line with such examples, we contend that cultural practices that may appear, from the outside, to be devoid of instrumental utility, could in fact be selectively...
Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: it must emerg...
While we cannot directly measure the psychological preferences of individuals, and the moral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies of people from the past, we can use cultural artifacts as a window to the zeitgeist of societies in particular historical periods. At present, an increasing number of digitized texts spanning several centuries is availab...
Life history theory is increasingly invoked in psychology as a framework for understanding differences in individual preferences. In particular, evolutionary human scientists tend to assume that, along with reproductive strategies, several behavioral traits such as cooperation and risk-taking and, in its broadest version, a range of psychological a...
Our goal in this paper is to use an evolutionary approach to explain the existence and design-features of human moral cognition. Our approach is based on the premise that human beings are under selection to appear as good cooperative investments. Hence they face a trade-off between maximizing the immediate gains of each social interaction, and maxi...
A central question in behavioral and social sciences is understanding to what extent cultural traits are inherited from previous generations, transmitted from adjacent populations or produced in response to changes in socioeconomic and ecological conditions. As quantitative diachronic databases recording the evolution of cultural artifacts over man...
Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred to as the emergence of ‘courtly love’). However, more recent works have shown a similar increase in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures....
Effective climate change mitigation is a social dilemma: the benefits are shared collectively but the costs are often private. To solve this dilemma, we argue that we must pay close attention to the nature and workings of human cooperation. We review three social cognition mechanisms that regulate cooperation: norm detection, reputation management...
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 ori...
Why do many people moralize harmless bodily pleasures, such as gluttony, masturbation, and drinking alcohol? In three pre-registered experiments (N > 1,600), we investigated whether this is because they perceive bodily pleasures as indirectly facilitating antisocial behaviors by altering self-control. In Study 1 and 2, participants judged that targ...
In recent decades, a large body of work has highlighted the importance of emotional processes in moral cognition. Since then, a heterogeneous bundle of emotions as varied as anger, guilt, shame, contempt, empathy, gratitude, and disgust have been proposed to play an essential role in moral psychology. However, the inclusion of these emotions in the...
We propose an approach reconciling the ultimate-level explanations proposed by Savage et al. and Mehr et al. as to why music evolved. We also question the current adaptationist view of culture, which too often fails to disentangle distinct fitness benefits.
Individual observations of risky behaviors present a paradox: individuals who take the most risks in terms of hazards (smoking, speeding, risky sexual behaviors) are also less likely to take risks when it comes to innovation, financial risks or entrepreneurship. Existing theories of risk-preferences do not explain these patterns. From a simple mode...
Why do many human societies condemn apparently harmless and pleasurable behaviors, such as lust, gluttony, drinking, drugs, gambling, or even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, hedonic restraint, sobriety, decency and piety as cardinal moral virtues? While existing accounts consider this puritanical morality as an exception to the coope...
Social trust is at the center of democratic societies, but it varies considerably between individuals and cultures. Socioeconomic status has been identified as an important predictor of such variability. Although this association has mostly been reported for measures of socioeconomic status taken in adulthood, recent studies have found unique effec...
In recent decades, a large body of work has highlighted the importance of emotional processes in moral cognition. Since then, a heterogeneous bundle of emotions as varied as anger, guilt, shame, contempt, empathy, gratitude, and disgust have been proposed to play an essential role in moral psychology. However, the inclusion of these emotions in the...
Individuals exposed to deprivation tend to show a characteristic behavioral syndrome suggestive of a short time horizon. This pattern has traditionally been attributed to the intrinsically higher unpredictability of deprived environments, which renders waiting for long term rewards more risky (i.e. collection risks are high). In the current paper,...
Why do, across ascetic spiritual traditions (e.g. Ancient Greek spiritualities, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism), a moralizing side restricting bodily pleasures, and a joyful side celebrating self-control derived well-being develop in concert? Why are these two intertwined cultural traits a recent development in hu...
Why do moral religions exist? An influential psychological explanation is that religious beliefs in supernatural punishment is cultural group adaptation enhancing prosocial attitudes and thereby large-scale cooperation. An alternative explanation is that religiosity is an individual strategy that results from high level of mistrust and the need for...
Why do, across ascetic spiritual traditions (e.g. Ancient Greek spiritualities, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism), a moralizing side restricting bodily pleasures, and a joyful side celebrating self-control derived well-being develop in concert? Why are these two intertwined cultural traits a recent development in hu...
Significance
We analyzed a large sample of English and French theatre plays and tracked the dynamics of words related to cooperation and dominance before and after early modern revolutions. We show that prior to both the English Civil War and French Revolution, there was a sharp rise in the frequency of words associated with prosociality, trustwort...
Social trust is linked to a host of positive societal outcomes, including improved economic performance, lower crime rates and more inclusive institutions. Yet, the origins of trust remain elusive, partly because social trust is difficult to document in time. Building on recent advances in social cognition, we design an algorithm to automatically g...
Individual observations of risky behaviors present a paradox: individuals who take the most risks in terms of hazards (smoking, speeding, risky sexual behaviors) are also less likely to take risks when it comes to innovation, financial risks or entrepreneurship. Existing theories of risk-preferences do not explain these patterns. From a simple mode...
In contrast to language or technology, many “symbolic” cultural phenomena do not seem to confer immediate fitness benefits. Standard approaches to cultural evolution in this domain focus on the recipients or consumers, which does not explain why these phenomena emerge. As a solution, we propose to consider the fitness costs and benefits incurred in...
In this article, we model cultural knowledge as a capital in which individuals invest at a cost. To this end, following other models of cultural evolution, we explicitly consider the investments made by individuals in culture as life history decisions. Our aim is to understand what then determines the dynamics of cultural accumulation. We show that...
It is a trope in psychological science to define the human species as inherently social. Yet, despite its key role in human behaviour, the mechanisms by which social bonding actually shapes social behaviour have not been fully characterized. Across six studies, we show that the motivation for social bonding does not indiscriminately increase indivi...
Social trust is at the center of democratic societies but it varies considerably between individuals and societies, which deeply affects a range of prosocial behaviours. Socioeconomic status has been iden- tified as an important predictor of such variability. Although this association has mostly been reported for measures of socioeconomic status ta...
The evolutionary basis of religions is a debated issue. A predominant approach hypothesizes that religious beliefs spread via cultural group selection, notably because they enhance prosocial attitudes and large-scale cooperation. Alternative approaches, based on individual selection, suggest that religiosity is a way for individuals to moralize oth...
Individuals exposed to deprivation tend to show a characteristic behavioural syndrome suggestive of a short time horizon. This pattern has traditionally been attributed to the intrinsically higher unpredictability of deprived environments, which renders waiting for long term rewards more risky (i.e. collection risks are high). In the current paper,...
I am grateful to have received so many stimulating commentaries from interested colleagues regarding the psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution and the role of evolutionary theory in understanding historical phenomena. Commentators criticized, extended, and explored the implications of the perspective I presented, and I wholeheartedly a...
This paper aims to understand the dynamics of cultural accumulation when cultural knowledge is costly to produce and costly to learn. We first show that the cost of social learning prevents any significant cultural accumulation, as individuals rapidly reach a maximum amount of knowledge that they can barely learn over the course of their lives, wit...
A growing number of experimental and theoretical studies show the importance of partner choice as a mechanism to promote the evolution of cooperation, especially in humans. In this paper, we focus on the question of the precise quantitative level of cooperation that should evolve under this mechanism. When individuals compete to be chosen by others...
A bstract
A growing number of experimental and theoretical studies show the importance of partner choice as a mechanism to promote the evolution of cooperation, especially in humans. In this paper, we focus on the question of the precise quantitative level of cooperation that should evolve under this mechanism. When individuals compete to be chosen...
There is considerable variability in the degree to which individuals rely on their peers to make decisions. Although theoretical models predict that environmental risks shift the cost-benefit trade-off associated with social information use, this idea has received little empirical support. Here we aim to test the effect of childhood environmental a...
Leader choice is a cornerstone of modern democracies and a central topic in cognitive sciences. In the present paper, we discuss an unresolved question in leader choice research: How can the cognitive mechanisms underpinning leader choice be both exquisitely responsive to contextual cues and blatantly suboptimal? Specifically, leaders displaying fe...
We applaud Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) article on economic folk beliefs. We believe that it is crucial for the future of democracy to identify the cognitive systems through which people form their beliefs about the working of the economy. In this commentary, we put forward the idea that, although many systems are involved, fairness is probably the m...
That humans belong to a highly social species is hardly debated and it is now well-established that being motivated to form solid social bonds enhances fitness across multiple mammal species. Yet, the proximate mechanisms by which such social motivation promotes success in the human ecological niche are mostly underspecified. Here, we demonstrate a...
A long tradition of research in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries has investigated how people weigh individual welfare versus group welfare in their moral judgments. Relatively less research has investigated the generalizability of results across non-WEIRD populations. In the current study, we ask participants ac...
I applaud Singh's proposition to use evolutionary psychology to explain the recurrence of shamanistic beliefs. Here, I suggest that evolutionary mechanisms (i.e., life history theory) also can explain the variability of the distribution of shamanism. When resources are abundant, individuals become more patient and more open minded to the point that...
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...
Pepper & Nettle explain the behavioral constellation of deprivation (BCD) in terms of differences in collection risk (i.e., the probability of collecting a reward after some delay) between high- and low-socioeconomic-status (SES) populations. We argue that a proper explanation should also include the costs of waiting per se, which are paid even whe...
There is considerable variation in health and reproductive behaviours within and across human populations. Drawing on principles from Life History Theory, psychosocial acceleration theory predicts that individuals developing in harsh environments decrease their level of somatic investment and accelerate their reproductive schedule. Although there i...
Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people's leader preferences are partly driven by early s...
Equity, defined as reward according to contribution, is considered a central aspect of human fairness in both philosophical debates and scientific research. Despite large amounts of research on the evolutionary origins of fairness, the evolutionary rationale behind equity is still unknown. Here, we investigate how equity can be understood in the co...
Simulation procedures, analytical model and supplementary discussion.
(PDF)
There is considerable variation in health and reproductive behaviours within and across human populations. Drawing on principles from Life History Theory, psychosocial acceleration theory predicts that individuals developing in harsh environments decrease their level of somatic investment and accelerate their reproductive schedule. Although there i...
We agree with Van Lange et al. that climate is likely to affect individuals' social behaviour in many ways. However, we suspect that its impact on physiology and psychology is so remote that its predictive power disintegrates almost completely through the causal chain underlying aggression and violence.