Jackson Joshua Conrad, Halberstadt Jamin, Takezawa Masanori, Liew Kongmeng, Smith Kristopher, Apicella Coren, Gray Kurt
Department of Behavioral Science, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.
Department of Psychology, University of Otago.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2023 Dec;125(6):1207-1238. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000358. Epub 2023 Sep 21.
Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like "moral" and "immoral"? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as "localized" (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions) versus "generalized" (varying along a single dimension from morally bad to morally good). This variation might be partly the product of cultural evolutionary adaptations to different kinds of social networks. As networks grow larger, perceptions of generalized morality are increasingly valuable for predicting cooperation during partner selection, especially in novel contexts. Our studies show that social network size correlates with perceptions of generalized morality in United States and international samples (Study 1) and that East African hunter-gatherers with greater exposure outside their local region perceive morality as more generalized compared to those who have remained in their local region (Study 2). We support the adaptive value of generalized morality in large and unfamiliar social networks with an agent-based model (Study 3), and in experiments where we manipulate partner unfamiliarity (Study 4). Our final study shows that perceptions of morality have become more generalized over the last 200 years of English-language history, which suggests that it may be coevolving with rising social complexity and anonymity in the English-speaking world (Study 5). We discuss the implications of this theory for the cultural evolution of political systems, religion, and taxonomical theories of morality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
为什么人们会认为一个慷慨的人也应该诚实呢？为什么我们甚至会使用“道德的”和“不道德的”这样的词汇呢？我们用一种关于人们如何看待道德品质的新模型来探讨这些问题。我们提出，人们在将道德品质视为“局部化”（在许多情境嵌入维度上变化）还是“普遍化”（在从道德坏到道德好的单一维度上变化）的程度上存在差异。这种差异可能部分是文化进化适应不同类型社会网络的产物。随着网络规模的扩大，对普遍道德的认知对于预测伴侣选择过程中的合作越来越有价值，尤其是在新情境中。我们的研究表明，在美国和国际样本中，社会网络规模与对普遍道德的认知相关（研究1），并且与留在当地的东非狩猎采集者相比，更多接触当地以外地区的东非狩猎采集者认为道德更具普遍性（研究2）。我们通过基于主体的模型（研究3）以及在操纵伴侣陌生程度的实验（研究4）来支持普遍道德在大型且陌生社会网络中的适应性价值。我们的最终研究表明，在英语语言历史的过去200年里，对道德的认知变得更加普遍，这表明它可能与英语世界中不断上升的社会复杂性和匿名性共同进化（研究5）。我们讨论了这一理论对政治制度、宗教以及道德分类理论的文化进化的影响。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2023美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
