Journal ArticleDOI
The roots of modern justice: cognitive and neural foundations of social norms and their enforcement
Joshua W. Buckholtz,René Marois +1 more
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This commentary outlines some potential cognitive and neural processes that may underlie the ability to learn norms, to follow norms and to enforce norms through third-party punishment and proposes that such processes depend on several domain-general cognitive functions that have been repurposed, through evolution's thrift, to perform these roles.Abstract:
Among animals, Homo sapiens is unique in its capacity for widespread cooperation and prosocial behavior among large and genetically heterogeneous groups of individuals. This ultra-sociality figures largely in our success as a species. It is also an enduring evolutionary mystery. There is considerable support for the hypothesis that this facility is a function of our ability to establish, and enforce through sanctions, social norms. Third-party punishment of norm violations ("I punish you because you harmed him") seems especially crucial for the evolutionary stability of cooperation and is the cornerstone of modern systems of criminal justice. In this commentary, we outline some potential cognitive and neural processes that may underlie the ability to learn norms, to follow norms and to enforce norms through third-party punishment. We propose that such processes depend on several domain-general cognitive functions that have been repurposed, through evolution's thrift, to perform these roles.read more
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Changing Social Norm Compliance with Noninvasive Brain Stimulation
TL;DR: It is shown that the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC) is involved in both voluntary and sanction-induced norm compliance, and that rLPFC activity is a key biological prerequisite for an evolutionarily and socially important aspect of human behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
Friends or Foes: Is Empathy Necessary for Moral Behavior?
Jean Decety,Jason M. Cowell +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that although there is a relationship between morality and empathy, it is not as straightforward as apparent at first glance and it is critical to distinguish among the different facets of empathy, as each uniquely influences moral cognition and predicts differential outcomes in moral behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
Genetic origins of social networks in rhesus macaques
Lauren J. N. Brent,Sarah R. Heilbronner,Julie E. Horvath,Julie E. Horvath,Julie E. Horvath,Janis Gonzalez-Martinez,Angelina V. Ruiz-Lambides,Athy Robinson,J. H. Pate Skene,Michael L. Platt +9 more
TL;DR: Evidence that social network tendencies are heritable in a gregarious primate, rhesus macaques, is provided, suggesting that, like humans, the skills and temperaments that shape the formation of multi-agent relationships have a genetic basis in nonhuman primates.
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Costly third-party punishment in young children
TL;DR: Investigating costly third-party punishment in 5- and 6-year-old children shows that from early in development children show a sophisticated capacity to promote fair behavior, and shows that 6- year-olds were willing to sacrifice resources to intervene against unfairness.
Journal ArticleDOI
The developmental foundations of human fairness
TL;DR: McAuliffe et al. as discussed by the authors demonstrate that the signatures of human fairness can be traced into childhood by finding that children make sacrifices for fairness when they have less than others, when others have been unfair and when they had more than others.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I
TL;DR: A genetical mathematical model is described which allows for interactions between relatives on one another's fitness and a quantity is found which incorporates the maximizing property of Darwinian fitness, named “inclusive fitness”.
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An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function
Earl K. Miller,Jonathan D. Cohen +1 more
TL;DR: It is proposed that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them, which provide bias signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of activity along neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and outputs needed to perform a given task.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Brain's Default Network Anatomy, Function, and Relevance to Disease
TL;DR: Past observations are synthesized to provide strong evidence that the default network is a specific, anatomically defined brain system preferentially active when individuals are not focused on the external environment, and for understanding mental disorders including autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease.
Journal ArticleDOI
Altruistic punishment in humans.
Ernst Fehr,Simon Gächter +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment and that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishments are possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out.
Posted Content
Altruistic Punishment in Humans
Ernst Fehr,Simon Gaechter +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation, and that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punished.