Oliver Curry

Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Cooperation requires that individuals are able to identify, and preferentially associate with, others who have compatible preferences and the shared background knowledge needed to solve interpersonal coordination problems. The present study investigates the nature of such similarity within social networks, asking: What do friends have in common? And what is the relationship between similarity and altruism? The results show that similarity declines with frequency of contact; similarity in general is a significant predictor of altruism and emotional closeness; and, specifically, sharing a sense of humor, hobbies and interests, moral beliefs, and being from the same area are the best predictors. These results shed light on the structure of relationships within networks and provide a possible checklist for predicting attitudes toward strangers, and in-group identification.

Altruism in networks: the effect of connections

Why are individuals altruistic to their friends? Theory suggests that individual, relationship and network factors will all influence the levels of altruism; but to date, the effects of social network structure have received relatively little attention. The present study uses a novel correlational design to test the prediction that an individual will be more altruistic to friends who are well-connected to the individuals other friends. The result shows that, as predicted, even when controlling for a range of individual and relationship factors, the network factor (number of connections) makes a significant contribution to altruism, thus showing that individuals are more likely to be altruistic to better-connected members of their social networks. The implications of incorporating network structure into studies of altruism are discussed.

Who's Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?

David Hume argued that values are the projections of natural human desires, and that moral values are the projections of desires that aim at the common good of society. Recent developments in game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behaviour and neuroscience explain why humans have such desires, and hence provide support for a Humean approach to moral psychology and moral philosophy. However, few philosophers have been willing to pursue this naturalistic approach to ethics for fear that it commits something called ‘the naturalistic fallacy’. This paper reviews several versions of the fallacy, and demonstrates that none of them present an obstacle to this updated, evolutionary version of Humean ethical naturalism.

Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach

What is morality, where does it come from, and how does it work? Scholars have struggled with these questions for millennia. But we now have a scientific answer. The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ uses the mathematics of cooperation—the theory of nonzero-sum games—to identify the many distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that it is the solutions employed by humans that constitute ‘morality’. Thus, morality turns out to be a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social life. This theory generates a comprehensive taxonomy of moral values—a Periodic Table of Ethics—that includes obligations to family, group loyalty, reciprocity, bravery, respect, fairness, and property rights. And because morality as cooperation makes principled predictions about the structure and content of human morality, which can be tested against those of rival theories, it reveals that the study of morality is simply another branch of science.

The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing

Although laughter is probably of deep evolutionary origin, the telling of jokes, being language-based, is likely to be of more recent origin within the human lineage. In language-based communication, speaker and listener are engaged in a process of mutually understanding each other’s intentions (mindstates), with a conversation minimally requiring three orders of intentionality. Mentalizing is cognitively more demanding than non-mentalizing cognition, and there is a well-attested limit at five orders in the levels of intentionality at which normal adult humans can work. Verbal jokes commonly involve commentary on the mindstates of third parties, and each such mindstate adds an additional level of intentionality and its corresponding cognitive load. We determined the number of mentalizing levels in a sample of jokes told by well-known professional comedians and show that most jokes involve either three or five orders of intentionality on the part of the comedian, depending on whether or not the joke involves other individuals’ mindstates. Within this limit there is a positive correlation between increasing levels of intentionality and subjective ratings of how funny the jokes are. The quality of jokes appears to peak when they include five or six levels of intentionality, which suggests that audiences appreciate higher mentalizing complexity whilst working within their natural cognitive constraints.

‘Putting Ourselves in the Other Fellow’ s Shoes’ : The Role of ‘Theory of Mind’ in Solving Coordination Problems

AbstractHow do people solve coordination problems? One possibility is that they use ‘ Theory of Mind’ to generate expectations about others’ behaviour. To test this, we investigate whether the ability to solve interpersonal coordination problems is associated with individual differences in ‘ Theory of Mind’ , as measured by a questionnaire addressing autistic-spectrum personality traits. The results suggest that successful coordination is associated with Theory-of-Mind function, but not with the non-social components of autistic personality (e.g., pattern detection, imagination). We discuss the implications of this finding for future research, and the assessment of autistic-spectrum presentations in adult populations.

Cross cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride

Significance Cross-cultural tests from 16 nations were performed to evaluate the hypothesis that the emotion of pride evolved to guide behavior to elicit valuation and respect from others. Ancestrally, enhanced evaluations would have led to increased assistance and deference from others. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potential action an anticipated pride intensity that tracks the magnitude of the approval or respect that the action would generate in the local audience. All tests demonstrated that pride intensities measured in each location closely track the magnitudes of others’ positive evaluations. Moreover, different cultures echo each other both in what causes pride and in what elicits positive evaluations, suggesting that the underlying valuation systems are universal. Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others’ valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = +0.82) and foreign (mean r = +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.

Get real: evolution as metaphor and mechanism

In his recent BJIPR article, Peter Kerr expressed modest ambitions for the role of evolutionary theorising in the social sciences (Kerr 2002). At the very least, he suggests that evolutionary theory can provide useful metaphors for analysing political and institutional change. At the most, he speculates that institutional change might occur in ways strictly analogous to biological evolution. In this short article, I argue that the similarities between evolution and institutional change are superficial, and that Kerr’s suggestions to the contrary are based on misunderstandings of biological evolution. Consequently, there is little to be gained, and much to be lost, from using evolutionary theory as a metaphor in this context. As an alternative, I argue that the real promise of evolution comes not from metaphorical or analogical applications of the theory, but from actual applications of the theory to the evolved design of the psychologies of the political actors who actually have the intentions and make the decisions.

Understanding cooperation through fitness interdependence

Some acts of human cooperation are not easily explained by traditional models of kinship or reciprocity. Fitness interdependence may provide a unifying conceptual framework, in which cooperation arises from the mutual dependence for survival or reproduction, as occurs among mates, risk-pooling partnerships and brothers-in-arms.

A range of kindness activities boost happiness

ABSTRACT This experiment investigates the effects of a seven-day kindness activities intervention on changes in subjective happiness. The study was designed to test whether performing different types of kindness activities had differential effects on happiness. Our recent systematic review and meta-analysis of the psychological effects of kindness (Curry, et al. 2018) revealed that performing acts of kindness boosts happiness and well-being. However, we noted in that review that rarely had researchers specifically compared the effects of kindness to different recipients, such as to friends or to strangers. Thus in a single factorial design (n=683) we compare acts of kindness to strong social ties, weak social ties, novel acts of self kindness, and observing acts of kindness, against a no acts control group. The results indicate that performing kindness activities for seven days increases happiness. In addition, we report a positive correlation between the number of kind acts and increases in happiness. Neither effect differed across the experimental the groups, suggesting that kindness to strong ties, to weak ties, and to self, as well as observing acts of kindness, have equally positive effects on happiness.