Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly
human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: First, it has a …

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 …

What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate
“how” question or as an ultimate “why” question. The “how” question is about the mental and …

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 …

crossing the border into the moral domain changes moral thinking in two ways:(1) the facts
at hand become “anthropocentric” facts not easily open to revision, and (2) moral reasoning …

Many situations in human life present choices between (a) narrowly preferred particular
alternatives and (b) narrowly less preferred (or aversive) particular alternatives that …

Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms–“strong”
and “weak” reciprocity–that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity …

Social dilemmas occur when the pursuit of self-interest by individuals in a group leads to
less than optimal collective outcomes for everyone in the group. A critical assumption in the …

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-
relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including …

We propose the Selfish Goal model, which holds that a person's behavior is driven by
psychological processes called goals that guide his or her behavior, at times in contradictory …