Empathy reflects the ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others,
often eliciting a motivation to care for their well-being. It plays a central role in prosocial …

Scholars from across the social sciences, biological sciences, and humanities have long
emphasized the role of human morality in supporting cooperation. How does morality arise …

Third-party punishment of antisocial others is unique to humans and seems to be universal
across cultures. However, its emergence in ontogeny remains unknown. We developed a …

To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring
relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose …

Adults punish moral transgressions to satisfy both retributive motives (such as wanting
antisocial others to receive their 'just deserts') and consequentialist motives (such as …

According to Graham and colleagues (2013), a “first draft” of moral cognition emerges early
and universally in development and is then gradually revised by experience and culture. In …

Recent research revealed that infants attend to agents' intentions when they evaluate
helping actions. The current study investigated whether infants also consider agents' …

We examined whether 21-month-old infants could distinguish between two broad types of
social power: respect-based power exerted by a leader (who might be an authority figure …

Adults and older children are more likely to punish a wrongdoer for a moral transgression
when the victim belongs to their group. Building on these results, in violation-of-expectation …

Responding to wrongdoing is a core feature of our social lives. Indeed, a central assumption
of modern institutional justice systems is that transgressors should be punished. In this …