Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-mzsfj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-16T15:45:07.144Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The difference between ice cream and Nazis: Moral externalization and the evolution of human cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2017

P. Kyle Stanford
P. Kyle Stanford*
Affiliation:
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697stanford@uci.eduhttp://www.lps.uci.edu/lps_bios/stanford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A range of empirical findings is first used to more precisely characterize our distinctive tendency to objectify or externalize moral demands and obligations, and it is then argued that this salient feature of our moral cognition represents a profound puzzle for evolutionary approaches to human moral psychology that existing proposals do not help resolve. It is then proposed that such externalization facilitated a broader shift to a vastly more cooperative form of social life by establishing and maintaining a connection between the extent to which an agent is herself motivated by a given moral norm and the extent to which she uses conformity to that same norm as a criterion in evaluating candidate partners in social interaction generally. This connection ensures the correlated interaction necessary to protect those prepared to adopt increasingly cooperative, altruistic, and other prosocial norms of interaction from exploitation, especially as such norms were applied in novel ways and/or to novel circumstances and as the rapid establishment of new norms allowed us to reap still greater rewards from hypercooperation. A wide range of empirical findings is then used to support this hypothesis, showing why the status we ascribe to moral demands and considerations exhibits the otherwise puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements that it does, as well as showing how the need to effectively advertise our externalization of particular moral commitments generates features of our social interaction so familiar that they rarely strike us as standing in need of any explanation in the first place.

Keywords

altruismcooperationcorrelated interactionethicsevolutiongossiphypercooperationhypocrisymoralitymoral psychologyprosocial behavior

Information

Type
Target Article
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 41 , 2018 , e95
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Aharoni, E., Sinott-Armstrong, W. & Kiehl, K. A. (2012) Can psychopathic offenders discern moral wrongs? A new look at the moral/conventional distinction. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 121:484–97.Google Scholar
Baumard, N., André, J.-B. & Sperber, D. (2013) A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36:59–122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blair, R. (1995) A cognitive developmental approach to morality: Investigating the psychopath. Cognition 57:1–29.Google Scholar
Boesch, C. (2005) Joint cooperative hunting among wild chimpanzees: Taking natural observations seriously. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(5):692–93.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2005) The origin and evolution of cultures. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bullinger, A. F., Melis, A. P. & Tomasello, M. (2011) Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, prefer individual over collaborative strategies towards goals. Animal Behaviour 82:1135–41.Google Scholar
Burkhardt, J. M., Allon, O., Amici, F., Fichtel, C., Finkenwirth, A., Heschl, A., Huber, J., Isler, K., Kosonen, Z. K., Martins, E., Meulman, E. J., Richiger, R., Rueth, K., Spilmann, B., Wiesendanger, S. & van Schaik, C. P. (2014) The evolutionary origin of human hyper-cooperation. Nature Communications 5: article no. 4747. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5747.Google Scholar
Callaghan, T., Moll, H., Rakoczy, H., Warneken, F., Liskowski, U., Behne, T. & Tomasello, M. (2011) Early social cognition in three cultural contexts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 76:vii–viii, 1–142.Google Scholar
Cheney, D. L. (2011) Extent and limits of cooperation in animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(Suppl. 2):10902–909.Google Scholar
Darwin, C. (1871) The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. John Murray.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin's dangerous idea. Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P. & Kurzban, R. (2009) Mysteries of morality. Cognition 112:281–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeScioli, P. & Kurzban, R. (2013) A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin 139:477–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Waal, F. (1996) Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
De Waal, F. (2006) Primates and philosophers: How morality evolved, ed. Ober, J. & Macedo, S.. (Includes commentaries by Ober, J. & Macedo, S.. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996) Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004) Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Journal of General Psychology 8:100–10.Google Scholar
Emler, N. (1990) A social psychology of reputation. European Journal of Social Psychology 1:171–93.Google Scholar
Emler, N. (1994) Gossip, reputation, and social adaptation. In: Good gossip, ed. Goodman, R. F. & Ben-Ze'ev, A., pp. 117–38. Kansas University Press.Google Scholar
Emler, N. (2001) Gossiping. In: The new handbook of language and social psychology, ed. Robinson, W. P. & Giles, H., pp. 317–38. John Wiley.Google Scholar
Enquist, M. & Leimar, O. (1993) The evolution of cooperation in mobile organisms. Animal Behaviour 45:747–57.Google Scholar
Epley, N. & Dunning, D. (2000) Feeling “holier than thou”: Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79:861–75.Google Scholar
Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. (2003) The nature of human altruism. Nature 425:785–91.Google Scholar
Fletcher, G., Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. (2012) Differences in cognitive processes underlying the collaborative activities of children and chimpanzees. Cognitive Development 27:136–53.Google Scholar
Frank, R. H. (1988) Passions within reason: The strategic role of the emotions. W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Gabennesch, H. (1990) The perception of social conventionality by children and adults. Child Development 61:2047–59.Google Scholar
Goodwin, G. P. & Darley, J. M. (2008) The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism. Cognition 106:1339–66. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.06.007.Google Scholar
Goodwin, G. P. & Darley, J. M. (2012) Why are some moral beliefs perceived to be more objective than others? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48(1):250–56. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.08.006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guala, F. (2012) Reciprocity: Strong or weak? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35(1):1–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haidt, J., Koller, S. H. & Dias, M. G. (1993) Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65:613–28.Google Scholar
Hamann, K., Warneken, F., Greenberg, J. R. & Tomasello, M. (2011) Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees. Nature 476:328–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hamlin, J. K., Mahajan, N., Liberman, Z. & Wynn, K. (2013) Not like me=bad: Infants prefer those who harm dissimilar others. Psychological Science 24:589–94.Google Scholar
Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K. & Bloom, P. (2007) Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature 450:557–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hare, B. & Tomasello, M. (2004) Chimpanzees are more skillful in competitive than in cooperative cognitive tasks. Animal Behaviour 68:571–81.Google Scholar
Haviland, J. B. (1977) Gossip as competition in Zinacantan. Journal of Communication 27:186–91.Google Scholar
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J. & Norenzayan, A. (2010) The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33(2):61–135.Google Scholar
Horner, V., Carter, J. D., Suchak, F. & de Waal, F. B. M. (2011) Spontaneous prosocial choice in chimpanzees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108:13847–51.Google Scholar
Jensen, K., Hare, B., Call, J. & Tomasello, T. (2006) What's in it for me? Self-regard precludes altruism and spite in chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 273:1013–21.Google ScholarPubMed
Jordan, J. J., Sommers, R., Bloom, P. & Rand, D. G. (2017) Why do we hate hypocrites? Evidence for a theory of false signaling. Psychological Sciences 28:356–68.Google Scholar
Joyce, R. (2006) The evolution of morality. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kelly, D., Stich, S., Haley, K. J., Eng, S. J. & Fessler, D. M. T. (2007) Harm, affect, and the moral/conventional distinction. Mind and Language 22:117–31. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199733477.003.0013.Google Scholar
Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E. & Spelke, E. S. (2007) The native language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104:12577–80.Google Scholar
Kline, M. A. (2015) How to learn about teaching: An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching behavior in humans and other animals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38(1):1–71.Google Scholar
Mahajan, N. & Wynn, K. (2012) Origins of “us” versus “them”: Prelinguistic infants prefer similar others. Cognition 124:227–33.Google Scholar
Melis, A. P., Altricher, K. & Tomasello, M. (2013) Allocation of resources to collaborators and free-riders in 3-year-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 114:364–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Melis, A. P., Schneider, A.-C. & Tomasello, M. (2011a) Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, share food in the same way after collaborative and individual food acquisition. Animal Behaviour 82:485–93.Google Scholar
Melis, A. P. & Semmann, D. (2010) How is human cooperation different? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B: Biological Sciences 365:2663–74.Google Scholar
Melis, A. P., Warneken, F., Jensen, K., Schneider, A., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. (2011b) Chimpanzees help conspecifics to obtain food and non-food items. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 278:1405–13.Google Scholar
Moll, H. & Tomasello, M. (2007) Cooperation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362:639–48.Google Scholar
Nichols, S. (2004) Sentimental rules: On the natural foundations of moral judgment. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, S. & Folds-Bennett, T. (2003) Are children moral objectivists? Children's judgments about moral and response-dependent properties. Cognition 90(2):B23–32. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0010-0277(03)00160-4.Google Scholar
Nisan, M. (1987) Moral norms and social conventions: A cross-cultural comparison. Developmental Psychology 23:719–25.Google Scholar
Nucci, L. P. (1986) Children's conceptions of morality, social convention, and religious prescription. In: Moral dilemmas: Philosophical and psychological reconsiderations of the development of moral reasoning, ed. Harding, C., pp. 137–74. Precedent Press.Google Scholar
Povinelli, D. J. (2000) Folk physics for apes: The chimpanzee's theory of how the world works. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sarkissian, H., Park, J., Tien, D., Wright, J. C. & Knobe, J. (2011) Folk moral relativism. Mind and Language 26:482–505.Google Scholar
Silk, J. B., Brosnan, S. F., Vonk, J., Henrich, J., Povinelli, D. J., Richardson, A. S., Lambeth, S. P., Mascaro, J. & Schapiro, S. J. (2005) Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members. Nature 437:1357–59.Google Scholar
Silk, J. B. & House, B. R. (2011) Evolutionary foundations of prosocial sentiments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(Suppl. 2):10910–17.Google Scholar
Skitka, L. J., Bauman, C. W. & Sargis, E. G. (2005) Moral conviction: Another contributor to attitude strength or something more? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8:895–917.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skyrms, B. (1996) Evolution of the social contract. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smetana, J. (2006) Social-cognitive domain theory: Consistencies and variations in children's moral and social judgments. In: Handbook of moral development, ed. Killen, M. & Smetana, J., pp. 119–53. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Stanford, P. K. (2017) Bending towards justice. Philosophy of Science 84:369–78.Google Scholar
Sterelny, K. (2012) The evolved apprentice: How evolution made humans unique. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Suchak, M., Eppley, T. M., Campbell, M. W. & de Waal, F. B. M. (2014) Ape duos and trios: Spontaneous cooperation with free partner choice in chimpanzees. PeerJ 2:e417. (Online journal). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.417.Google Scholar
Suchak, M., Eppley, T. M., Campbell, M. W., Feldman, R. A., Quarles, L. F. & de Waal, F. B. M. (2016) How chimpanzees cooperate in a competitive world. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 113:10215–20.Google Scholar
Thompson, C., Barresi, J. & Moore, C. (1997) The development of future-oriented prudence and altruism in preschoolers. Cognitive Development 12:199–212.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2009) Why we cooperate. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2016) A natural history of human morality. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., Hare, B., Lehman, H. & Call, J. (2007) Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: The cooperative eye hypothesis. Journal of Human Evolution 52:314–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Turiel, E. (1983) The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Turiel, E., Killen, M. & Helwig, C. (1987) Morality: Its structure, functions, and vagaries. In: The emergence of morality in young children, ed. Kagan, J. & Lamb, S., pp. 155–243. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Warneken, F., Lohse, K., Melis, A. & Tomasello, M. (2011) Young children share the spoils after collaboration. Psychological Science 22:267–73.Google Scholar
Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. (2006) Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science 311:1301–303.Google Scholar
Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. (2007) Helping and cooperation at 14 months of age. Infancy 11:271–94.Google Scholar
Wright, J. C., Grandjean, P. T. & McWhite, C. B. (2013) The meta-ethical grounding of our moral beliefs: Evidence for meta-ethical pluralism. Philosophical Psychology 26:336–61.Google Scholar
Wright, J. C., McWhite, C. B. & Grandjean, P. T. (2014) The cognitive mechanisms of intolerance: Do our meta-ethical commitments matter? In: Oxford studies in experimental philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Lombrozo, T., Nichols, S. & Knobe, J., pp. 28–61. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Young, L. & Durwin, A. J. (2013) Moral realism as moral motivation: The impact of meta-ethics on everyday decision-making. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49:302–306.Google Scholar