A large literature shares the view that social norms shape human cooperation, but without a
clean empirical identification of the relevant norms almost every behaviour can be …

Understanding the proximate and ultimate sources of human cooperation is a fundamental
issue in all behavioural sciences. In this paper, we review the experimental evidence on …

Winner of the William James Book Award “Magisterial... Makes an impressive argument that
most distinctly human traits are established early in childhood and that the general …

Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral
psychology. Based on experimental data comparing great apes and human children, he …

Across societies, humans punish norm violations. To date, research on the antecedents and
consequences of punishment has largely relied upon agent-based modeling and laboratory …

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to
resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history:(1) the rise of large-scale …

Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial
transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and …

In The Hadza, Frank Marlowe provides a quantitative ethnography of one of the last
remaining societies of hunter-gatherers in the world. The Hadza, who inhabit an area of East …

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the
extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may …

Fines, corporal punishments, and other procedures of punitive justice recur across small-
scale societies. Although they are often assumed to enforce group norms, we here propose …