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- Humans are a social species, and to survive and
reproduce they must often behave in cooperative
fashion, at least to those in face-to-face groups. Evolutionary
theorists have argued that there are four
aspects of benign human behavior: compassion, a
sense of morality, a desire for justice, and the capacity
to cooperate.
- Morality is a system of principles people use as guides
to making evaluative judgments about their own
and others' actions and character. It involves obligation,
inclusiveness, and sanctions.
- The moral realm encompasses the ethic of autonomy,
concerning rights and freedom, the ethic of community,
concerning obligations and duties, and the ethic
of divinity, concerning ideas about purity and sin.
- Moral judgment is similar across different cultures
in that most people condemn such moral transgressions
as harm to children, incest, and genocide. But
moral judgment can also differ across cultures, with
some cultures favoring one or more of the three
aspects of morality more than the others.
- Our moral judgments involve two systems—a system
of fast, emotion-based intuitions, and a system of
more complex reasoning processes about moral
intuitions.
- Distributive justice involves the assessment of
whether resources have been allocated fairly or
unfairly. Self-interest and egocentric construals can
distort people's sense of distributive justice.
- Three different principles affect how resources are
allocated in different relationships: equity, equality,
and need. Different domains (family versus work)
and different cultures rely on different principles in
establishing distributive justice. Relative deprivation
also affects people's sense of distributive justice.
- The manner in which authority figures allocate
resources and punishments goes by the label of procedural
justice. There is a sense of procedural justice
when authority figures are seen to be neutral, trustworthy,
and respectful of others.
- Restorative justice refers to the actions people take to
restore just conditions in the face of injustice. This
includes maintaining a belief in a just world by finding
victims to be at fault. It also includes retributive
punishment, or revenge, as well as utilitarian punishment,
which is designed to lessen the likelihood of
further damage by the perpetrator.
- Another form of restorative justice is reconciliation,
which reestablishes a bond between opponents
through apologies and forgiveness.
- Cooperation is part of our evolutionary heritage and
is necessary for living together peacefully in groups.
- The prisoner's dilemma game is used to study cooperation.
It tempts participants to maximize their own
outcomes at the expense of another person by
defecting. This strategy backfires if the other person
also defects. The optimum outcome is for both to
settle for something less than the theoretical maximum
by cooperating.
- Cooperators tend to recognize that some people are
cooperators and others are competitors, whereas
competitors behave in such a way as to confirm
their mistaken hypothesis that everyone is a
competitor.
- The tit-for-tat strategy in the prisoner's dilemma
game is a reciprocal strategy that is cooperative, not
envious, not exploitable, forgives, and is easy to
read. This strategy helps maximize outcomes in
potentially competitive situations in real life.
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