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 …

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 …

Whether upheld as heroic or reviled as terrorism, people have been willing to lay down their
lives for the sake of their groups throughout history. Why? Previous theories of extreme self …

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 …

Our goal in this paper is to use an evolutionary approach to explain the existence and
design features of human moral cognition. Our premise is that humans are under selection …

We teach on Rutgers University's campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, located in the
southern part of the New York metropolitan area. On September 11, 2001, Beth was …

What role do emotions play in moral cognition? Leading accounts argue that a multiplicity of
emotions, including guilt, outrage, shame, empathy, and even disgust, play an essential role …

This book is intended primarily for scholars of religion; for those who wish to study religion in
a scientific manner, be they historians, anthropologists, sociologists or psychologists of …

Cooperative societies rely on reward and punishment for norm enforcement. We examined
the developmental origin of these interventions in the context of distributive fairness: past …

In our attempts to understand crime, researchers typically focus on proximate factors such as
the psychology of offenders, their developmental history, and the social structure in which …