Dennis L. Krebs

Empathy and altruism.

The psychophysiological responses of 60 subjects were measured as they observed a performer play a roulette game. Half of the subjects were led to believe that they were similar to the performer in personality and values, and half were led to believe that they were dissimilar. Half of the subjects in each condition believed that the performer won money and experienced pain as he played the game, and half believed that he performed a cognitive and motor skill task. Subjects who observed a performer who ostensibly experienced pleasure and pain exhibited greater psychophysiological reactions than subjects who did not. Subjects who believed they were similar to the performer tended to react more strongly than subjects who believed they were different from him. Similar subjects also reported identifying most with the performer and feeling the worst while he waited to receive shocks. It was concluded that the similar subjects empathized most with the performer who appeared to experience pleasure and pain. When required to make a choice between helping themselves at a cost to the performer or helping the performer at a cost to themselves, the subjects who reacted most empathically behaved most altruistically. The results were interpreted as casting some light on century-old questions about the human capacity for altruism.

Toward a More Pragmatic Approach to Morality: A Critical Evaluation of Kohlberg's Model

In this article, the authors evaluate L. Kohlbergs (1984) cognitive- developmental approach to morality, find it wanting, and introduce a more pragmatic approach. They review research designed to evaluate Kohlbergs model, describe how they revised the model to accommodate discrepant findings, and explain why they concluded that it is poorly equipped to account for the ways in which people make moral decisions in their everyday lives. The authors outline in 11 propositions a framework for a new approach that is more attentive to the purposes that people use morality to achieve. People make moral judgments and engage in moral behaviors to induce themselves and others to uphold systems of cooperative exchange that help them achieve their goals and advance their interests.

Handbook of evolutionary psychology: Ideas, issues, and applications.

Contents: Preface. Part I: Ideas. C. Crawford, The Theory of Evolution in the Study of Human Behavior: An Introduction and Overview. H.K. Reeve, Acting for the Good of Others: Kinship and Reciprocity With Some New Twists. G.F. Miller, How Mate Choice Shaped Human Nature: A Review of Sexual Selection and Human Evolution. B.S. Low, The Evolution of Human Life Histories. M Janicki, D.L. Krebs, Evolutionary Approaches to Culture. Part II: Issues. J.M. Bailey, Can Behavior Genetics Contribute to Evolutionary Behavioral Science? A. Wells, Evolutionary Psychology and Theories of Cognitive Architecture. L. Betzig, Not Whether to Count Babies, but Which. C. Crawford, Environments and Adaptations: Then and Now. H.R. Holcomb III, Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses. Part III: Applications. D.L. Krebs, The Evolution of Moral Behaviors. M.K. Surbey, Developmental Psychology and Modern Darwinism. D.M. Buss, The Psychology of Human Mate Selection: Exploring the Complexity of the Strategic Repertoire. M. Daly, M. Wilson, The Evolutionary Social Psychology of Family Violence. C.R. Badcock, PsychoDarwinism: The New Synthesis of Darwin and Freud. D.T. Kenrick, E.K. Sadalla, R.C. Keefe, Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology: The Missing Heart of Modern Cognitive Science. N.M. Malamuth, M.F. Heilmann, Evolutionary Psychology and Sexual Aggression. R. Thornhill, Darwinian Aesthetics. Y. Hedrick-Wong, The Global Environmental Crisis and State Behavior: An Evolutionary Perspective. I. Silverman, K. Phillips, The Evolutionary Psychology of Spatial Sex Differences. D. Bickerton, The Creation and Re-Creation of Language.

Morality: An Evolutionary Account

Refinements in Darwins theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential, cooperative, and altruistic “social instincts,” or decision-making strategies, that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social living and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive ways. Moral judgments, moral norms, and conscience originated from strategic interactions among members of groups who experienced confluences and conflicts of interest. Moral argumentation buttressed by moral reasoning is equipped to generate universal and impartial moral standards. Moral beliefs and standards are products of automatic and controlled information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. To understand how people make moral decisions, we must understand how early evolved mechanisms in the old brain and recently evolved mechanisms in the new brain are activated and how they interact. Understanding what a sense of morality is for helps us understand what it is.

The Construction of Moral Dilemmas in Everyday Life

This study investigated the extent to which people interpret real-life moral dilemmas in terms of an internal moral orientation, as Gilligan (1982, 1988) has suggested, or in terms of the content of the dilemma, as Wark and Krebs (1996, 1997) have reported. Thirty women and 30 men listed the issues they saw in descriptions of real-life prosocial, antisocial and social pressure types of moral dilemma. Results revealed that Gilligans model underestimates the influence of dilemma content. Moral dilemmas differed in the extent to which they were viewed in terms of the same issues by different participants. There was relatively little within-person consistency in moral orientation. There were four gender differences. Compared to men, women rated social pressure dilemmas as involving more care-orientated issues, and prosocial dilemmas as more significant. Compared to women, men viewed all dilemmas as involving more justice-based issues, and reported experiencing more antisocial dilemmas.

Sources of variation in moral judgment: Toward a model of real-life morality

To evaluate the extent to which the models of moral judgment advanced by Kohlberg (1984) and by Gilligan (1982, 1988) are able to account for real-life moral judgment, we investigated the relation of sex and type of moral dilemma to moral stage and moral orientation. Eighty young adult men and women made moral judgments about two hypothetical Kohlberg dilemmas, two real-life antisocial dilemmas, and two real-life prosocial dilemmas. We failed to find any sex differences in moral judgment. Moral stage and moral orientation varied across the three types of dilemma. Kohlbergs dilemmas pulled for justice-oriented Stage 4 moral judgments, real-life prosocial dilemmas pulled for care-oriented Stage 3 moral judgments, and real-life antisocial dilemmas pulled for justice-oriented Stage 2 moral judgments. The content of moral judgments was related to their structure. There was a positive relation between stage of moral judgment on Kohlberg dilemmas and on real-life dilemmas. The implications of these findings for a new, more interactional, model of real-life moral judgment are discussed.

From the scene to the crime: the effect of alcohol and social context on moral judgment

Forty men and women were given Kohlbergs Moral Judgment Interview (MJI) while drinking in a natural setting and were asked a series of questions about whether they should and would drive impaired. In a second testing in an academic context, these subjects were given an alternate form of the MJI and were asked whether they drove on the previous occasion. Forty additional men and women completed the MJI in an academic context and responded to the impaired driving questions hypothetically. Results revealed that Ss scored lower on moral maturity in the the social drinking contexts than in the academic contexts, especially when highly intoxicated. Ss responding hypothetically attributed more moral integrity to themselves than to others, indicating they would not drive impaired. The self-righteousness of these attributions was apparent in the behavior of Ss who drove to the social drinking settings--all but 1 drove home, however impaired.

On the Evolution of Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

“Know yourself” is one of the most ancient of all injunctions. Although some primates possess the ability to recognize their own faces, and therefore must possess a rudimentary sense of self (Gallup, 1977), humans appear to be unique among animals in their ability to know themselves. What is the nature of this ability? How did it evolve, and why? How effective are the processes through which people acquire self-knowledge, and how valid are the story by telling its end, we will conclude that it often is maladaptive to perceive oneself accurately, that people are at least as adept at self-serving way, and that people are at least as adept at self-deception as they are at self-perception.

Gender and Perspective Differences in Moral Judgement and Moral Orientation

Abstract Forty male and female adults responded to two forms of Kohlbergs test‐‐one in the standard third‐person form, and the other imagining themselves as the protagonists in Kohlbergs dilemmas. Females obtained slightly lower moral maturity scores than males across both forms, but there were no sex differences in moral orientation. There were no significant effects for the perspective from which Kohlbergs test was taken, on either moral maturity or moral orientation. Care‐oriented moral judgements were more prevalent in dilemmas involving life vs. law conflicts than in dilemmas involving conscience vs. punishment conflicts. Subjects did not consistently make either care‐ or justice‐oriented moral judgements. There was a significant negative correlation between the frequency of care‐oriented judgements and moral maturity for males, but not for females. Although these results are partially consistent with the possibility that Kohlbergs test and scoring system are biased against females, they do not s...

Role-taking ability and altruistic behavior in elementary school children

Symbolic interaction and cognitive developmental theories such as those of Mead, Piaget, and Kohlberg assume that role-taking skills are a central determinant of social development. Research by Flavell, et.al. (1968) and Selman (1971) has supported the idea that children’s ability to take the role of others undergoes stage-like evolutions, and mediates the development of communication skills and moral reasoning. To date, however, no one has tested whether the development of role-taking skills is related to significant changes in social behavior. In a review of research on helping behavior, Krebs (1970) found that there is a general increase in helping behavior in children after approximately age 8. Piaget (1926), Flavell (1968), and others also have found that the egocentric orientation of roletaking in young children undergoes a transformation to a sociocentric orientation around age eight. The present study sought to test whether children who have reached a sociocentric stage of role-taking behave more altruistically in a natrualistic setting than their cognitively more egocentric peers.