Notes on Morality and Evolution: Intro

I TAed a Behavioral Ecology course this semester, and a couple weeks ago I gave a 45 minute presentation to the class. I was asked to present about my research, but since I didn't have any decent data from my experiment yet, I decided to just present on topic related to my research that is somewhat relevant to the course. I'm going to make a series of blog posts based on my presentation.

So, here you go.

Intro.

This picture was chosen by the course professor to be on the front page of the course website. It is a great choice because it is such a dramatic illustration of an animal behavior that seems puzzling but can be explained quite well. The course covers parental favoritism and sibling rivalry, and students learn that these phenomena are widespread in the animal kingdom and that there are piles of data showing how these behaviors are explained by evolutionary theories.

I think it is interesting that this picture should even seem so dramatic to us. After all, if this behavior is so common, and makes such good sense in light of well established scientific theory, why should it be so surprising to us?

I think that it is because of our moral sense that the image is so powerful. We feel bad for the little bird getting squashed by his mother. It seems unfair. And if we were to see a pictures of a human mother doing the equivalent to her child, we'd probably make a moral judgment about her.

So, this series of blog posts is about morality, specifically from an evolutionary perspective. Morality is a broad topic, and a difficult one to define, despite most of us feeling like we have a pretty clear understanding of what it is. I'm not going to attempt to thoroughly cover the subject; instead I'll be breaking morality down into components or looking at certain facets of morality. By components I mean things like I mentioned in regards to the baby bird: feelings of fairness, empathy, and moral judgment. A facet of morality to keep in mind is that our moral sense seems to push us to act in service to others, as opposed to our own "selfish" interests. Another is that moral rules and judgments often feel absolute, an observation that I'll expound upon in the next post.

I'll discuss 4 pieces of research in 3 future posts, that will look something like this:

1) Why did morality evolve?
A model of stability-dependent cooperation.

2) Phylogeny and the Origins of Fairness.
Fairness in monkeys?

3) How do we study morality in psychology labs?
i. Economic games in the lab: Dictator games with manipulation of information.
ii. Proximate factors: audience effects.

Stay tuned for the next installment.