Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the
canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics …

The development and maintenance of prosocial, other-oriented behaviors has been of
considerable recent interest. Though it is clear that prosocial behaviors emerge early and …

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 …

There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community
and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However …

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 …

A sense of fairness plays a critical role in supporting human cooperation 1, 2, 3. Adult norms
of fair resource sharing vary widely across societies, suggesting that culture shapes the …

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 …

From an evolutionary perspective, morality is a form of cooperation. Cooperation requires
individuals either to suppress their own self-interest or to equate it with that of others. We …

Young children endorse fairness norms related to sharing, but often act in contradiction to
those norms when given a chance to share. This phenomenon has rarely been explored in …