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SOCIAL NORMS AND HUMAN NORMATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2018

Daniel Kelly  and
Taylor Davis
Daniel Kelly
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Purdue University
Taylor Davis
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Purdue University
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Abstract:

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch a cognitive evolutionary approach for developing explanations of social change that is anchored in the psychological mechanisms underlying normative cognition and the transmission of social norms. We throw the relevant features of this approach into relief by comparing it with the self-fulfilling social expectations account developed by Bicchieri and colleagues. After describing both accounts, we argue that the two approaches are largely compatible, but that the cognitive evolutionary approach is well suited to encompass much of the social expectations view, whose focus on a narrow range of norms comes at the expense of the breadth the cognitive evolutionary approach can provide.

Keywords

normsnormativitymoral psychologycultural evolutionsocial change
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Summer 2018 , pp. 54 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2018 

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References

* We received much useful feedback on this material, and would like to thank: an anonymous reviewer, Lacey Davison, Nicolae Morar, and especially Gerald Gaus, Shaun Nichols, and the other contributors to this volume.

1 For another prominent approach see Southwood, Nicholas and Eriksoon, Lina, “Norms and Conventions,” Philosophical Explorations 14, no. 2 (2011): 195–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Brennan, Geoffrey, Eriksson, Lina, Goodin, Robert E., and Southwood, Nicholas, Explaining Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and for some useful overview discussions see Raymond, Leigh, Weldon, S. Laurel, Kelly, Daniel, Arriaga, Ximena, and Clark, Ann Marie, “Making Change: Norms and Informal Institutions as Solutions to ‘Intractable’ Global Problems,” Political Research Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2013): 197–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bicchieri, Cristina and Muldoon, Ryan, "Social Norms," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014), Zalta, Edward N., ed., URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/social-norms/>..>Google Scholar

2 See especially Bicchieri, Cristina, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006),Google Scholar Bicchieri, Cristina, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016),Google Scholar and Cristina Bicchieri and Ryan Muldoon, "Social Norms."

3 Cristina Bicchieri and Peter McNally, “Shrieking Sirens: Schemata, Scripts, and Social Norms. How Change Occurs,” in the present volume, 23–53.

4 Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild, chap. 5.

5 The “minimal” here is meant to capture that we wish to commit to, and take a stand on, as few of the many interesting and important open questions that are still being debated about human normative psychology as we can, while still putting forward a view that is plausible, that captures many of the key points of agreement in the literatures we draw on. As will become clear, however, “minimal” should not be interpreted as suggesting, for instance, minimal appeal to innate mental structure or content, or to specialized psychological machinery that goes beyond the domain-general, barebones repertoire associated with blank-slate models of the mind; for some discussion, see Linquist, Stephan and Rosenberg, Alex, “The Return of the ‘Tabula Rasa’: Review of Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition by Kim Sterelny,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74, no. 2 (2007): 476–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For overviews of the recent emergence of the richly interdisciplinary field of empirical moral psychology, see Doris, John and Stich, Stephen, “Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2006), Zalta, Edward N., ed., URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2006/entries/moral-psych-emp/,Google Scholar Doris, John and The Moral Psychology Research Group, eds., The Moral Psychology Handbook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010),CrossRefGoogle Scholar Greene, Joshua, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin Books, 2014),Google Scholar Tiberius, Valerie, Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction (Oxford: Routledge, 2014),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Alfano, Mark, Moral Psychology: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).Google Scholar We return to the issue of distinguishing distinctively moral norms and moral cognition from other varieties in Section IV.

7 Indeed, on the Minimal Account many of the most important features of human normative psychology are underpinned by what Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)Google Scholar describes as System 1 mechanisms and processes; they are fast, intuitive, automatic, and unconscious.

8 Nichols, Shaun, Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See Nichols, Shaun and Mallon, Ron, “Moral Dilemmas and Moral Rules” Cognition 100, no. 3 (2006): 530–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Mallon, Ron and Nichols, Shaun, “Rules,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. Doris, J. et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 297–320)CrossRefGoogle Scholar on rules. However, what we are delineating as normative psychology is almost certainly not exhaustive of the psychology of rules, as people can be well aware of rules that are not intuitively norms (the rules of chmess, for an extreme example provided by Daniel Dennett, in “Higher-order truths about chmess,” Topoi 1 [2006]: 39–41), and also aware of rules which have no bearing on their own behavior. For example, a person might have read about the taboos and norms of cultures and societies to which she does not belong, and feels no motivation to enforce or comply with. In such a case, those rules are represented, perhaps more purely cognitively, in her mind, but in some component other than in her norm system.

10 The quoted passage is from Chudek, Maciej, Zhao, Wanying, and Henrich, Joseph, “Culture-Gene Coevolution, Large-Scale Cooperation, and the Shaping of Human Social Psychology,” in Cooperation and Its Evolution, ed. Sterelny, Kim, Joyce, Richard, Calcott, Brett, and Fraser, Ben (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2013): 425–58;Google Scholar also see Richerson, Peter and Boyd, Robert, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),Google Scholar Chudek, Maciej, and Henrich, Joseph, “Culture–Gene Coevolution, Norm-Psychology and the Emergence of Human Prosociality,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 5 (2011): 218–26,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gelfand, Michelle and Jackson, Joshua, “From One Mind to Many: The Emerging Science of Cultural Norms,” Current Opinion in Psychology 8 (2016): 175–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Fessler, Daniel and Machery, Edouard, “Culture and Cognition,” in Margolis, E., Samuels, R., and Stich, S. P., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 503–527.Google Scholar

12 In the main text we are making a fairly straightforward point about the similar division of explanatory labor between appeals to innate versus learned traits in explanations of both linguistic and normative capacities. The strengths and weaknesses of a more developed analogy between language, on the one hand, and social rules and morality, on the other, have been well explored in recent years. For a book length development and defense of the analogy from a cognitive scientific and legal point of view, see Mikhail, John, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and for a shorter version Mikhail, John, “Universal Moral Grammar,” Trends in Cognitive Science 11 (2007): 143–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Roedder, Erica and Harman, Gil, “Linguistics and Moral Theory,” The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. Doris, J. et al., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 273–96,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dwyer, Susan, Huebner, Bryce, and Hauser, Marc, “The Linguistic Analogy,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2, no. 3 (2009): 486–510,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hauser, Marc, Young, Liane, and Cushman, Fiery, “Reviving Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy,” in Sinnott-Armstrong, W., ed., Moral Psychology: Vol. 2. The Cognitive Science of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).Google Scholar For a dissenting voice concerning the utility of the linguistic analogy, see Jesse Prinz, “Resisting the Linguistic Analogy: A Commentary on Hauser, Young, and Cushman,” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Moral Psychology: Vol. 2. And for an orthogonal but suggestive inversion of the usual explanatory order between language and morality (broadly construed as norm-governed cooperation), see Richerson, Peter and Boyd, Robert, “Why Language Possibly Evolved,” Biolinguistics 4, nos. 2–3 (2010): 289–306.Google Scholar

13 Sripada, Chandra and Stich, Stephen, “A Framework for the Psychology of Norms,” in Carruthers, Peter, Laurence, Stephen, and Stich, Stephen, eds., The Innate Mind Vol 2: Culture and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 280–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Schmidt, Marco, Butler, Lucas, Heinz, Julia and Tomasello, Michael, “Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds,” Psychological Science (2016): 1–11.Google Scholar

15 For different kinds of arguments in favor of the claim that not all intrinsic motivation need be innate or have innately specified aims, and that ultimate ends can be acquired and changed in the ways implied by this claim about human normative psychology, see, for example, Sripada, Chandra, “Adaptationism, Culture, and the Malleability of Human Nature,” The Innate Mind Vol 3.: Foundations and Future Horizons, ed. Carruthers, Peter, Laurence, Stephen, and Stich, Stephen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 311–29,Google Scholar Stich, Stephen, “Why There Might Not Be an Evolutionary Explanation for Psychological Altruism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56 (2016): 3–6,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, from a different angle, Millgram, Elijah, The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. chaps. 3 and 10.Google Scholar

16 See, for example Atran, Scott, “The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism,” The Washington Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2006): 127–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 See Shweder, Richard, Much, Nancy, Mahapatra, Manamohan, and Park, Lawrence, “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, and Divinity), and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering,” in Brandt, A. and Rozin, P., eds., Morality and Health (New York: Routledge, 1997),Google Scholar Rozin, Paul, Lowery, Laura, Imada, Sumio, and Haidt, Jonathan, “The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and three moral codes (Community, Autonomy, Divinity),” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 4 (1999): 574–86;CrossRefGoogle Scholar c.f. Haidt, Jonathan and Joseph, Craig, “The Moral Mind: How 5 Sets of Innate Moral Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules,” in The Innate Mind, Vol. 3, ed. Carruthers, Peter, Laurence, Stephen, and Stich, Stephen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 367–91.Google Scholar

18 In confining our characterization of some of the key mechanisms of the human norm system, we are sketching part of a proximate psychological explanation of human normativity. There are also complimentary ultimate explanations of how those psychological mechanisms evolved, the most promising of which appeal to culture-driven genetic evolution. Most of the details of these explanations fall beyond the scope of this essay, though see Maciej Chudek and Joseph Henrich, “Culture–Gene Coevolution, Norm-Psychology and the Emergence of Human Prosociality,” 218–26, Chudek, Maciej, Zhao, Wanying, and Henrich, Joseph, “Culture-Gene Coevolution, Large-Scale Cooperation, and the Shaping of Human Social Psychology,” Cooperation and Its Evolution, ed. Sterelny, Kim, Joyce, Richard, Calcott, Brett, and Fraser, Ben (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013): 425–58,Google Scholar and Sterelny, Kim, “Cooperation, Culture, and Conflict,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67, no. 1 (2014): 1–31Google Scholar for recent paper-length discussions; see Henrich, Joseph, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar for a book length discussion of the distinct processes of cultural evolution and culture-driven genetic evolution; and see Kelly, Daniel and Hoburg, Patrick, “A Tale of Two Processes: On Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter,” Philosophical Psychology (2017) for an overview for a philosophical audience.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 It is entirely possible that not all behavior-guiding rules of social interactions are socially learned. Whether any particular such rules, perhaps some putatively moral rules that prohibit incest or battery, are part of the innately specified human psychological endowment is one of those issues on which we take no stand, though see Kelly, Daniel, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 98,Google Scholar and Mikhail, John, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011a), for discussion and references for each case.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 See Richerson, Peter and Boyd, Robert, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005a)Google Scholar for an overview; c.f. Bowles, Samuel, Choi, Jung-Kyoo, and Hopfensitz, Astrid, “The Coevolution of Individual Behaviors and Group Level Institutions,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 223 (2003): 135–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Gerald Gaus and Shaun Nichols, “Moral Learning in the Open Society: The Theory and Practice of Natural Liberty,” Social Philosophy and Policy (forthcoming).

22 See Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter, “Punishment Allows the Evolution of Cooperation (Or Anything Else) in Sizable Groups,” Ethnology and Sociobiology 13 (1992): 171–95,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fehr, Ernest and Gachter, Simon, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” Nature 415 (2002): 137–40,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fehr, Ernest and Fischbacher, Urs, “Third Party Punishment and Social Norms,” Evolution and Human Behavior 25, no. 2 (2004): 63–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Such feedback loops and endogenously maintained equilibria are common properties of complex self-organizing systems. What is interesting and perhaps unique to groups of human beings, however, are some of the central mechanisms by which stable equilibria are achieved and sustained, namely culturally transmitted norms, punishment, and human normative psychology. But also, this is why social arrangements can be durable without any Leviathan-like entity to serve as a foundational stabilizer or ultimate norm enforcer; stable social arrangements stabilize themselves.

24 See especially Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter, “Gene-Culture Coevolution and the Evolution of Social Institutions,” in Better Than Conscious? Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications for Institutions, Engel, C. and Singer, W., eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 305–324,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Richerson, Peter and Henrich, Joseph, “Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems,” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 3, no. 1 (2012): 38–80,Google Scholar and Robert Boyd, “A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Made Humans Exceptionally Adaptable and Cooperative,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, (manuscript).

25 See Henrich, Joseph, Boyd, Robert, and Richerson, Peter, “Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution,” Human Nature 19 (2008): 119–37 for diagnosis and correction of common types of confusion, though.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 No attempt to provide a strict and univocal definition of a culture has won widespread acceptance. We have been emphasizing the role of social learning a bit more, but Ramsey, Grant, “Culture in Humans and Other Animals,” Biology and Philosophy 27 (2013): 457–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar defends an explication that is useful and largely aligns with the way we are understanding the term: “Culture is information transmitted between individuals or groups, where this information flows through and brings about the reproduction of, and a lasting change in, the behavioral trait” (ibid., 466).

27 See Ramsey, Grant and De Block, Andreas, “Is Cultural Fitness Hopelessly Confused?” British Journal of the Philosophy Science (2015): 1–24Google Scholar for discussion of the idea of cultural fitness, and Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter, “Memes: Universal Acid or Better Mousetrap?” in Darwinizing Culture, ed. Aunger, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar for a convincing case that there are better tools for theorizing about cultural evolution than the most well known one, the “meme.”

28 See Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, chap. 3 for a nice presentation of a simple model that illustrates the idea, for instance how “Conformity bias at the level of the individual leads to reasonably accurate replication at the population level” (ibid., 86).

29 Henrich, Joseph and Gil-White, Francesco, “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission,” Evolution and Human Behavior 22 (2001): 165–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Muthukrishna, Michael, Morgan, Thomas, and Henrich, Joseph, “The When and Who of Social Learning and Conformist Transmission,” Evolution and Human Behavior 37 (2016): 10–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 See Sperber, Dan, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1996),Google Scholar Atran, Scott, “Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998): 547–609,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Boyer, Pascal, “Cognitive Tracks of Cultural Inheritance: How Evolved Intuitive Ontology Governs Cultural Transmission,” American Anthropologist 100 (1999): 876–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 O’Gorman, Rick, Wilson, David Sloan, and Miller, Ralph, “An Evolved Cognitive Bias for Social Norms” Evolution and Human Behavior 29 (2008): 71–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Nichols, Shaun, “On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion in Cultural Evolution,” Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): 234–55,CrossRefGoogle Scholar c.f. Heath, Chip, Bell, Chris, and Sternberg, Emily, “Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 1028–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 For a range of perspectives on this idea, see Gottschall, Jonathan, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Made Us Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012),Google Scholar Donald, Merlin, “The Slow Process: A Hypothetical Cognitive Adaptation for Distributed Cognitive Networks,” Journal of Physiology 101 (2006): 214–22,Google Scholar and Tylén, Kristien, et al., “Brains Striving for Coherence: Long-Term Cumulative Plot Formation in the Default Mode Network,” NeuroImage 121 (2015): 106–114,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cristina Bicchieri and Peter McNally, “Shrieking Sirens: Schemata, Scripts, and Social Norms. How Change Occurs,” in the present volume, Milkoreit, Manjana, “The Promise of Climate Fiction: Imagination, Storytelling, and the Politics of the Future,” in Reimagining Climate Change, ed. Wapner, P. and Elvner, H. (New York: Routledge, 2016).Google Scholar

35 Barrett, Deirdre, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010),Google Scholar De Block, Andreas and Du Laing, Bart, “Amusing Ourselves to Death? Superstimuli and the Evolutionary Social Sciences,” Philosophical Psychology 23, no. 6 (2010): 821–43,CrossRefGoogle Scholar c.f. Daniel Kelly, “Moral Cheesecake, Evolved Psychology, and the Debunking Impulse,” to appear in the Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy, ed. R. Joyce (New York: Routledge Press, forthcoming).

36 Heintz, Christophe, “Institutions as Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution: Prospects of the Epidemiological Approach,” Biological Theory 2, no. 3 (2007): 244–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 We will continue to follow Richerson, Boyd, and Henrich in continuing to call these “instincts” but acknowledge that this terminology might be misleading. These psychological capacities and the mechanisms that underlie them are much more sophisticated, sensitive to subtle social cues, and productive of flexible inferences and behavior than the connotations of the term “instinct” suggest. We are thankful to Peter Railton for pressing us on this point. “Instinct” functions primarily to emphasize the fact that the traits in question are inherited genetically, rather than culturally.

38 Moya, Cristina and Henrich, Joseph, “Culture–Gene Coevolutionary Psychology: Cultural Learning, Language, and Ethnic Psychology,” Current Opinion in Psychology 8 (2016): 112–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 On norm enforcement see Schmidt, Marco, Rakoczy, Hannes, and Tomasello, Michael, “Young Children Enforce Social Norms Selectively Depending on the Violator’s Group Affiliation,” Cognition 124 (2012): 325–33,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and on reputation management see Engelmann, Jan, Over, Harriet, Herrmann, Esther, and Tomasello, Michael, “Young Children Care More about their Reputation with Ingroup Members and Potential Reciprocators,” Developmental Science 16, no. 6 (2013): 952–58.Google Scholar

40 See especially De Dreu, Carsten, “Oxytocin Modulates Cooperation within and Competition between Groups: An Integrative Review and Research Agenda,” Hormones and Behavior 61(2012): 419–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and De Dreu, Carsten and Kret, Mariska,“Oxytocin Conditions Intergroup Relations through Upregulated In-Group Empathy, Cooperation, Conformity, and Defense,” Biological Psychiatry 79 (2016): 165–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Balliet, Daniel, Wu, Junhui, and De Dreu, Carsten, “Ingroup Favoritism in Cooperation: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 140, no. 6 (2014): 1556–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides a largely vindicating meta-analysis of work on ingroup favoritism, and Hechler, Stephanie, Neyer, Franz, and Kessler, Thomas, “The Infamous among Us: Enhanced Reputational Memory for Uncooperative Ingroup Members,” Cognition 157 (2016): 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar explores differences in how people remember ingroup versus outgroup members. Also see Efferson, Charles, Lalive, Rafeal and Fehr, Ernest, “The Coevolution of Cultural Groups and Ingroup Favoritism,” Science 321 (2008): 1844–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an account of the co-evolutionary back and forth that selected for cultural groups and ingroup favoritism; Hoff, Karla, Kshetramade, Mayuresh, and Fehr, Ernest, “Caste and Punishment: The Legacy of Caste Culture in Norm Enforcement,” The Economic Journal 121 (2011): 449–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a closer look at a particular case, and how caste membership influences norm enforcement; and Moya, Cristina and Boyd, Robert, “Different Selection Pressures Give Rise to Distinct Ethnic Phenomena: A Functionalist Framework with Illustrations from the Peruvian Altiplano,” Human Nature 26, no. 1 (2015): 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar for useful distinctions between putatively different kinds of “groups.”

41 Cheng, Joey, Tracy, Jessica, Foulsham, Tom, Kingston, Alan, and Henrich, Joseph, “Two Ways to the Top: Evidence That Dominance and Prestige Are Distinct Yet Viable Avenues to Social Rank and Influence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104, no. 1 (2012): 103–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Also see Chudek, Maciej, Heller, Sarah, Birch, Susan, and Henrich, Joseph, “Prestige-Biased Cultural Learning: Bystander’s Differential Attention to Potential Models Influences Children’s Learning,” Evolution and Human Behavior 33 (2012): 46–56,CrossRefGoogle Scholar c.f. Bicchieri, Cristina, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chap. 5.Google Scholar

43 Daniel Kelly, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, chap. 4, and Kelly, Daniel, “Moral Disgust and The Tribal Instincts Hypothesis,” Cooperation and Its Evolution , ed. Sterelny, Kim, Joyce, Richard, Calcott, Brett, and Fraser, Ben (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 503–524.Google Scholar

44 Richerson, Peter, “Human Cooperation is a Complex Problem with Many Possible Solutions: Perhaps All of Them Are True!” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 4, no. 1 (2013): 139–52.Google Scholar

45 For more discussion here see Sterelny, Kim, “The Evolution and Evolvability of Culture,” Mind and Language 21 (2006): 137–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar (cited by Richardson, Henry, “Revising Moral Norms: Pragmatism and the Problem of Perspicuous Description,” in Bagnoli, C., ed., Constructivism in Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013))Google Scholar, Richerson, Peter, Collins, Dwight, and Genet, Russell, “Why Managers Need an Evolutionary Theory of Organizations,” Strategic Organization 4, no. 2 (2006): 201–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Richerson, Peter and Henrich, Joseph, “Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems,” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 3, no. 1 (2012): 38–80.Google Scholar

46 Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter, “Gene-Culture Coevolution and the Evolution of Social Institutions,” in Better Than Conscious? Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications for Institutions, ed. Engel, C. and Singer, W. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008a), 319.Google Scholar

47 Richerson, Peter et al., “Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: A Sketch of the Evidence,” Behavioural and Brain Sciences 39 (2016): 1–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1871), 160.Google Scholar

49 We will not discuss this idea in detail, but will note that it is easy to mistake cultural group selection for genetic group selection, and this mistake unfortunately bedevils debates about the merits of cultural group selection hypotheses. Properly understood, cultural group selection is not subject to the objections to group selection that dominated evolutionary biology in the later half of the twentieth century. Hopefully our discussion in the main text is enough to head off this common misunderstanding, as these hypotheses are in fact about competition of culture at a macro level, or selection between clusters of cultural variants and packages of norms, rather than between genetic adaptations. See Peter Richerson et al., “Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: A Sketch of the Evidence, 1–68 for a sophisticated modern formulation of the hypothesis, presentation of a wide array of evidence in support of it, and critical discussion. See Gerald Gaus, “The Egalitarian Species,” Social Philosophy and Policy 31, no. 2 (2015): 1–27 for an exploration of implications of the updated version of the hypothesis for Hayek’s political philosophy.

50 Compare “standards of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity” in Finnemore, Martha and Sikkink, Kathryn, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change” International Organization 52 (1998): 891,CrossRefGoogle Scholar as cited in Raymond, Leigh, Weldon, S. Laurel, Kelly, Daniel, Arriaga, Ximena, and Clark, Ann Marie, “Making Change: Norms and Informal Institutions as Solutions to ‘Intractable’ Global Problems,” Political Research Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2013): 197–211,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “learned behavioral standards shared and enforced by a community” in Maciej Chudek, and Joseph Henrich, “Culture–Gene Coevolution, Norm-Psychology and the Emergence of Human Prosociality,” 218.

51 In other words, if there is any stable, interesting, and important set of features that distinguish moral norms from the rest (or moral cognition from the rest, for that matter), finding and specifying it remains a deeply vexed enterprise. See Kelly, Daniel, Stich, Stephen, Haley, Kevin, Eng, Serena and Fessler, Daniel, “Harm, Affect, and the Moral/ Conventional Distinction,” Mind and Language 22, no. 2 (2007): 117–31,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kelly, Daniel and Stich, Stephen, “Two Theories of the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality,” The Innate Mind Vol 3: Foundations and Future Horizons, ed. Carruthers, Peter, Laurence, Stephen, and Stich, Stephen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 348–66,Google Scholar and Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter and Wheatley, Thalia, “The Disunity of Morality and Why it Matters to Philosophy,” The Monist 95, no. 3 (2012): 355–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar for discussions of the problems that arise for attempts to draw such a distinction based on currently available empirical theories, and skepticism about the project itself. See Haidt, Jonathan and Graham, Jesse, “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize,” Social Justice Research 20 (2007): 98–116,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Graham, Jesse, Haidt, Jonathan, and Nosek, Brian, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96, no. 5 (2009): 1029–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar for evidence that the folk seem to conceive of the scope of “morality” differently depending on political orientation and culture; also see Berniūnas, Renatas, Dranseika, Vilius, and Sousa, Paulo, “Are There Different Moral Domains? Evidence from Mongolia,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 19 (2016): 275–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar for recent cross cultural evidence from Mongolia. See Henrich, Joseph, Heine, Steven, and Norenzayan, Ara, “The Weirdest People in the World,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010): 61–135CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a general, albeit indirect, account that can suggest why, although it might seem obvious that there is such a distinction, the tendency of us WEIRDos to confer special status on some putatively distinctive subset of norms we designate as “moral” is likely a culturally parochial trait rather than a universal one.

52 See for instance the chart on page 41 of Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild.

53 For instance, “To uncover the reasons why a collective behavior survives, we have to look beyond attitudes to the beliefs and conditional preferences of those who engage in it. This is why I like to use almost exclusively preferences and expectations in my analysis of norms. They are easy to measure, and measuring them lets us meaningfully classify collective behaviors” (ibid., 10).

54 Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild, c.f. Wilson, David Sloan, “Intentional Cultural Change,” Current Opinion in Psychology 8 (2016): 190–93,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wilson, David Sloan, Hayes, Steven, Biglan, Anthony, and Embry, Dennis, “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2014): 395–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Richerson, Peter and Henrich, Joseph, “Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems,” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 3, no. 1 (2012): 38–80, at 67, our emphasis.Google Scholar