Research on morality has increased rapidly over the past 10 years. At the center of this
research are moral judgments—evaluative judgments that a perceiver makes in response to …

Humans possess great capacity for behavioral and cultural change, but our ability to
manage change is still limited. This article has two major objectives: first, to sketch a basic …

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 …

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 …

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

Moralizing religions, unlike religions with morally indifferent gods or spirits, appeared only
recently in some (but not all) large-scale human societies. A crucial feature of these new …

In How Humans Cooperate, Richard E. Blanton and Lane F. Fargher take a new approach to
investigating human cooperation, developed from the vantage point of an" anthropological …

Punishment can help maintain cooperation by deterring free-riding and cheating. Of
particular importance in large-scale human societies is third-party punishment in which …

The epic story and ultimate big history of how human society evolved from intimate chimp
communities into the sprawling civilizations of a world-dominating species If a chimpanzee …

Humans are outstanding in their ability to cooperate with unrelated individuals, and
punishment–paying a cost to harm others–is thought to be a key supporting mechanism …