Hugo Viciana

Hot utilitarianism and cold deontology: Insights from a response patterns approach to sacrificial and real world dilemmas

ABSTRACT Research on moral judgment with moral dilemmas suggests that “utilitarian” responses (UR) to sacrificial high-conflict dilemmas are due to decreased harm aversion, not only in individuals with clinical conditions, but also in healthy participants with high scores in antisocial personality traits. We investigated the patterns of responses to different dilemma types in healthy participants and present evidence that some URs to sacrificial dilemmas are morally motivated, as indicated by their empathic concern (EC) or primary psychopathy (PP) scores. In study 1 (N = 230) we tested students with four categories of sacrificial dilemmas featuring innocent victims. In study 2 (N = 590) we tested students with two categories of sacrificial dilemmas and two “real-world” moral dilemmas, where the agent can improve the lot of strangers by making a personal sacrifice. Results in both studies showed no decreased harm aversion in a pattern where the only UR is to the sacrificial dilemma where the number of saved people is very high, and significantly lower harm aversion only in the pattern of all-deontological respondents in Study 2. The analysis by response patterns allowed a better discrimination of the moral motivations of participants and showed that at least some of them express moral concerns in their URs.

Cultural transmission and biological markets

Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior can be seen as a costly strategy, one whose evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin-selection based theories for the evolution of cultural capacities. We explicitly formulate how a biological market can account for the evolution of deference and prestige-related phenomena, as well as how it can affect the dynamics of cumulative culture. We show that, under certain conditions, teaching evolves even when innovations are not sufficiently opaque and can be acquired by emulators via inadvertent transmission. Furthermore, teaching in a biological market is a precondition for enhanced individual learning abilities.

Credibility, credulity, and redistribution.

After raising some doubts for cultural group selection as an explanation of prosocial religiosity, we propose an alternative that views it as a greenbeard effect. We combine the dynamic constraints on the evolution of greenbeard effects with Iannaccones (1994) account of strict sects. Our model shows that certain social conditions may foster credulity and prosociality.