Tage Shakti Rai

The Evolution of Giving, Sharing, and Lotteries

A core feature of human societies is that people often transfer resources to others. Such transfers can be governed by several different mechanisms, such as gift giving, communal sharing, or lottery-type arrangements. We present a simple model of the circumstances under which each of these three forms of transfer would be expected to evolve through direct fitness benefits. We show that in general, individuals should favor transferring some of their resources to others when there is a fitness payoff to having social partners and/or where there are costs to keeping control of resources. Our model thus integrates models of cooperation through interdependence with tolerated theft models of sharing. We also show, by extending the HAWK-DOVE model of animal conflict, that communal sharing can be an adaptive strategy where returns to consumption are diminishing and lottery-type arrangements can be adaptive where returns to consumption are increasing. We relate these findings to the observed diversity in human resource-transfer processes and preferences and discuss limitations of the model.

ODD (observation- and description-deprived) psychological research

Most psychological research consists of experiments that put people in artificial situations that elicit unnatural behavior whose ecological validity is unknown. Without knowing the psychocultural meaning of experimental situations, we cannot interpret the responses of WEIRD people, let alone people in other cultures. Psychology, like other sciences, needs to be solidly rooted in naturalistic observation and description of people around the world. Theory should be inductively developed and tested against real-world behavior.

Beyond Harm, Intention, and Dyads: Relationship Regulation, Virtuous Violence, and Metarelational Morality

In the target article, Gray, Young, and Waytz (GYW) offer a unifying definition of the “moral” domain. The strong version of their argument is that moral judgments consist of cognizing an agent intentionally harming a patient; judgment not based in this template is nonmoral. What’s striking about the simplicity and beauty of their perspective is how much difficulty moral psychologists often have when asked to define what they mean by “moral.” Most of the time researchers avoid this problem by falling back on folk definitions and intuitively appealing examples. GYW tackle this problem directly by providing a definition and defending it. The field is in need of such unifying approaches. Although we judge that the authors’ argument is muddled in major conceptual confusions about the concept of “harm” and fundamental ambiguities about the sort of claim they are making, their perspective is important for the deep questions it raises about the role of intention, violence, and dyadic relationships in our moral psychology.

Rational hypocrisy: a Bayesian analysis based on informal argumentation and slippery slopes.

Moral hypocrisy is typically viewed as an ethical accusation: Someone is applying different moral standards to essentially identical cases, dishonestly claiming that one action is acceptable while otherwise equivalent actions are not. We suggest that in some instances the apparent logical inconsistency stems from different evaluations of a weak argument, rather than dishonesty per se. Extending Corner, Hahn, and Oaksfords (2006) analysis of slippery slope arguments, we develop a Bayesian framework in which accusations of hypocrisy depend on inferences of shared category membership between proposed actions and previous standards, based on prior probabilities that inform the strength of competing hypotheses. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that inferences of hypocrisy increase as perceptions of the likelihood of shared category membership between precedent cases and current cases increase, that these inferences follow established principles of category induction, and that the presence of self-serving motives increases inferences of hypocrisy independent of changes in the actions themselves. Taken together, these results demonstrate that Bayesian analyses of weak arguments may have implications for assessing moral reasoning.

Why are people violent

We, the authors, must make clear at the outset that, prescriptively, we judge most violence to be immoral. But in every culture, some people sometimes feel morally entitled or required to hurt or kill others. Violent initiations, human sacrifice, corporal punishment, revenge, beating spouses, torturing enemies, ethnic cleansing and genocide, honor killing, homicide, martial arts, and many other forms of violence are usually morally motivated. The fact is that people often feel – and explicitly judge – that in many contexts it is good to do these kinds of violence to others: people believe that in many cases hurting or killing others is not simply justifiable, it is absolutely, fundamentally right . Furthermore, people often regard others’ infliction of violence against third parties as morally commendable – and sometimes acknowledge or even appreciate the morality of violence inflicted on themselves. We wish this weren’t true – we abhor it. But it is true, so to understand or reduce violence, we must recognize its moral roots. Most violence is morally motivated . People do not simply justify or excuse their violent actions after the fact; at the moment they act, people intend to cause harm or death to someone they feel should suffer or die. That is, people are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying. In short, most violence is the exercise of moral rights and obligations. Working within the framework of relational models theory (Fiske, 1991, 1992, 2004) and relationship regulation theory (Rai and Fiske, 2011), our thesis is that people are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress , terminate, or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others . We call our theory virtuous violence theory.