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Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this article provides evidence regarding the choices of children in the Kogi indigenous community of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a traditional society living in the mountains of Northern Colombia that practices swidden agriculture, cattle-raising, and enjoys a special cultural status granted by the Colombian Constitution. Two groups of 6–7 and 10–11 year olds (N = 104) were tested on a modified dictator game and several scenarios from a resource distribution task including different fairness criteria. Our results point to the lack of focality of the idea of merit among Kogi children at these ages when deciding on third-party allocation tasks, even when the design prevented equal distribution.

Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this research report provides evidence regarding the choices of children in the Kogi indigenous community of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a small-scale society living in the mountains of Northern Colombia that practices swidden agriculture, cattle-raising, and enjoys a special cultural status granted by the Colombian Constitution. Two groups of 6-7 and 10-11 year olds (N=104) were tested on a modified dictator game and several scenarios from a resource distribution task including different fairness criteria. Our results point to the lack of focality of the idea of merit among Kogi children at these ages when deciding on third-party allocation tasks, even when the experimental design prevented equal distribution.

Is animal culture a real entity or is it rather just in the eye of the beholder? The concept of culture began to be increasingly used in the context of animal behaviour research around the 1960s. Despite its success, it is not clear that it represents what philosophers have traditionally thought to be a natural kind. In this article I will show, however, how conceiving of animal culture in this fashion has played a role in the “culture wars”, and what lessons we can draw from this. First, an analysis of the epistemological landscape of author keywords related to the concept of animal cultures is presented, thus vindicating the centrality of the concept in describing a broad range of findings. A minimal definition that encompasses the multiple strands of research incorporating the notion of culture is proposed. I then systematically enumerate the ways in which culture thus conceived cannot be considered a natural kind in the study of animal behaviour. This is accomplished by reviewing the efforts and possibilities of anchoring the elusive idea in specific mechanisms, homologies, selection pressures, homeostatic property clusters, or alternatively, its reduction or elimination. Finally, a plausible interpretation of the scientific status of the animal culture concept is suggested that is compatible with both its well established use in animal behaviour research and its inferential limitations. Culture plays the role of a well-established epistemic kind, a node that connects different areas of research on common themes.

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.

Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical findings which seem to support some of Williams’ main ideas on this issue have received scant attention. In this article, we would like to focus on the phenomenon of moral relativism regarding spatiotemporal distance as an entry point to the nature of folk moral relativism and the methodology of meta-ethics. To do so, we first introduce Williams’ relativism of distance. Then we compare Williams’ approach on this matter to recent experimental approaches on folk relativism. On this score the main result is that Williams’ proposal is consistent with several well-established insights on the experimental study of folk relativism. Williams’ relativism of distance is not only empirically plausible, but it is also of relevance for shaping the methodology of an empirically informed meta-ethics. We close this paper by stressing this methodological contribution.

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.

Although we are sensitive to the advantages of reactive attitudes as a starting point, we are concerned that confusion on the level of analysis can easily plague this type of account. We argue that what is needed here is a serious appraisal of the effects on the promotion of values of moralistic responses toward different types of agency.

Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior (sometimes called ¿teaching¿) can be seen as a costly strategy: one for which its 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 proposals for the evolution of cultural capacities. We demonstrate how a biological market can account for the evolution of teaching when individual learners are the exclusive focus of social learning (such as in a fast-changing environment). We also show how this biological market can affect the dynamics of cumulative culture. The model works best when it is difficult to have access to the observation of the behavior without the help of the actor. However, in contrast to previous non-mathematical hypotheses for the evolution of teaching, we show how teaching evolves, even when innovations are insufficiently opaque and therefore vulnerable to acquisition by emulators via inadvertent transmission. Furthermore, teaching in a biological market is an important precondition for enhancing individual learning abilities.

“¿Están los ciudadanos en condiciones de incorporar lo científico en sus deliberaciones públicas?” En lo que sigue voy a desarrollar un punto muy sencillo, a saber, que el modelo tradicional de deliberación puede enriquecerse a partir del estudio de la difusión de normas e ideas, lo cual da pie a una comprensión más completa de las condiciones de éxito de la deliberación pública. Frente a la idea de deliberación por la que individuos autónomos se dedican a un ejercicio de reflexión consciente e imbuido de autoconocimiento (véase Doris, 2015, Talking to Ourselves para una crítica de este relativismo), la deliberación sobre el terreno o lo que aquí llamo la deliberación “a lo silvestre” se produce en condiciones que son a menudo en muchos aspectos distintas a las que presupone esta concepción. Para empezar, no tiene por qué ser ni tan reflexiva, ni tan consciente de sus procesos como en el prototipo clásico. Sin embargo, la deliberación a lo silvestre es ubicua y en muchos casos funciona satisfactoriamente

Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side-effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explain this asymmetric pattern of judgment and the psychological factors involved in it. It has been posited that affective reactions to agents that bring about harmful side-effects could bias intentionality attributions in these cases, explaining the asymmetric pattern of intentionality judgments that we observe in the SEE. We call this the affective bias hypothesis (ABH). Evidence for the ABH is mixed, with some findings suggesting a role for affective processes, while others suggesting that affective processes play no role in the SEE. A possible explanation for these apparently contradictory results points to affective processes involved in the SEE being confined to anger. In a series of empirical studies, we systematically measured and manipulated participants’ anger in order to test this possibility. Our findings suggest that anger play no role in intentionality judgments in SEE cases, while providing support for a non-emotional motivation to blame as a factor underlying the SEE., The study was funded by the research project FFI2013-44007-P (Spanish Government: Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness).

Studies have found an association between the content of beliefs in the supernatural and increased cooperation in social groups. “High Moralizing Gods,” “fear of supernatural punishment,” and “supernatural monitoring” have been claimed to permit greater social cohesion through the specific epistemic engagement they produce in the minds of those who hold certain religious beliefs. However, the evolutionary pathways linking these religious features with cooperation remain unclear. Focusing on the example of belief in supernatural sanctioning, this chapter delineates different mechanisms by which beliefs in supernatural entities could, in principle, lead to greater cohesion and emphasizes the different predictions each evolutionary mechanism affords. It thus reassesses several studies that have been interpreted as supporting or as failing to support one or some of these cultural evolutionary processes. Finally, it proposes several avenues by which research addressing the link between cooperation and specific forms of belief in supernatural entities could be strengthened.

The authors note that Table 1 appeared incorrectly. The corrected table appears below. (Table Presented).

In this critical notice to Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, we focus on the question of whether Wright’s God is one which can be said to be an adaptation in a well defined sense. Thus we evaluate the likelihood of different models of adaptive evolution of cultural ideas in their different levels of selection. Our result is an emphasis on the plurality of mechanisms that may lead to adaptation. By way of conclusion we assess epistemologically some of Wright’s more controversial claims concerning the directionality of evolution and moral progress.

Social behavior in most human societies is characterized by the following of moral rules explicitly justified by religious belief systems. These systems constitute the diverse domain of human sacred values. Supernatural entities as founders or warranty of moral principles may be seen as a form of "conversation stoppers," considerations that can be dropped into a moral decision process in order to prevent endlessly reconsidering and endlessly asking for further justification. In this article we offer a general naturalistic framework toward answering the question of why supernatural entities are so attractive in moral argumentation. We present an explanatory model based on the phenomena of multiple channels of moral reasoning, the suspension of epistemic vigilance, and relevance assumptions through the attractiveness of the sacred, moral dumbfounding, and the expression of social coalitionary commitment. Thus, in light of much of current cognitive theory, sacred values make sense as basins in the evolutionary landscape of human morality.

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 Iannaccone's (1994) account of strict sects. Our model shows that certain social conditions may foster credulity and prosociality.

In Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach, Sridhar Venkatapuram defends the case that theories of justice can be assessed by how adequately they protect a series of considerations of equal concern with reference to health. Throughout the book, Venkatapuram convincingly argues against what he calls the “blind spot in modern philosophy regarding the connection between the duty to show equal respect and concern and the causation and distribution of health” (Venkatapuram 2011, Introduction).

In Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach, Sridhar Venkatapuram defends the case that theories of justice can be assessed by how adequately they protect a series of considerations of equal concern with reference to health. Throughout the book, Venkatapuram convincingly argues against what he calls the “blind spot in modern philosophy regarding the connection between the duty to show equal respect and concern and the causation and distribution of health” (Venkatapuram 2011, Introduction).

For scientific theories grounded in empirical data, replicability is a core principle, for at least two reasons. First, unless we accept to have scientific theories rest on the authority of a small number of researchers, empirical studies should be replicable, in the sense that its methods and procedure should be detailed enough for someone else to conduct the same study. Second, for empirical results to provide a solid foundation for scientific theorizing, they should also be replicable, in the sense that most attempts at replicating the original study that produced them would yield similar results. The XPhi Replicability Project is primarily concerned with replicability in the second sense, that is: the replicability of results. In the past year, several projects have shed doubt on the replicability of key findings in psychology, and most notably social psychology. Because the methods of experimental philosophy have often been close to the ones used in social psychology, it is only natural to wonder to which extent the results experimental philosophers ground their theory are replicable. The aim of the XPhi Replicability Project is precisely to reach a reliable estimate of the replicability of empirical results in experimental philosophy. To this end, several research teams across the world will replicate around 40 studies in experimental philosophy, some among the most cited, others drawn at random. The results of the project will be published in a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology dedicated to the topic of replicability in cognitive science.The official website of the project can be found here :https://sites.google.com/site/thexphireplicabilityproject/homeThe project can also be followed on social medias:https://twitter.com/XPhiReplicationhttps://www.facebook.com/XPhiReplicabilityProject/