In evolutionary perspective, what is most remarkable about human sociality is its many and
diverse forms of cooperation. Here, I provide an overview of some recent research, mostly …

Because motivations for prosocial actions typically are unclear, sometimes even to actors
but especially for observers, it is difficult to study prosocial motivation. This article reviews …

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 …

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 …

Recent studies have proposed that social norms play a key role in motivating human
cooperation and in explaining the unique scale and cultural diversity of our prosociality …

Children act prosocially already in their first years of life. Research has shown that this early
prosociality is mostly motivated by sympathy for others, but that, over the course of …

Researchers have proposed different accounts of the development of prosocial behavior in
children. Some have argued that behaviors like helping and sharing must be learned and …

In this review, I propose a new framework for the psychological origins of human
cooperation that harnesses evolutionary theories about the two major problems posed by …

A very simple reciprocal activity elicited high degrees of altruism in 1-and 2-y-old children,
whereas friendly but nonreciprocal activity yielded little subsequent altruism. In a second …