What is morality? Where does it come from? How does it work?
My research answers these questions, using a range of techniques from philosophy, experimental and social psychology and comparative anthropology.
Morality in theory
The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ (MAC) argues that morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. There are many different types of cooperation according to game theory; and so MAC leads us to expect many different types of morality, including: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, bravery, respect, fairness, and property rights. In this way, MAC provides a principled, systematic taxonomy of moral values.
I present the theory in this book chapter, and in this lecture.
I am currently working to extend the theory to sexual morality and environmental ethics, and investigating whether morality is a ‘combinatorial system’ in which a small number of moral ‘elements’ combine to form a large number of moral ‘molecules’.
moral psychology
We tested MAC’s predictions about the structure and content of morality developing a new self-report measure of morality, the Morality-as-Cooperation Questionnaire (MAC-Q), and comparing its psychometric properties to those of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). Over four studies, the results support the MAC-Q's seven-factor model of morality, but not the MFQ's five-factor model. Thus MAC emerges as the best available compass with which to explore the moral landscape.
Here’s the full, open access, paper; and you can find versions of the questionnaire on the OSF page. Also, here’s a summary of the strengths of MAC and the weaknesses of MFT.
We are currently using the MAC-Q to investigate the genetic and neuroanatomical basis of morality, to investigate the relationship between morals and politics, and to collect cross-cultural data on moral values.
We are also developing additional measures of the seven MAC moral domains, in order to investigate the function of moral emotions, and inferences about moral character.
Universal Moral Rules
Morality-as-cooperation predicts that specific forms of cooperative behaviour – helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior ownership – will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures. We tested this prediction by investigating the moral valence of these cooperative behaviours in the ethnographic records of 60 societies. We find that, as predicted, their moral valence is uniformly positive. We find also that the majority of these cooperative moral values appear in the majority of cultures, in all regions of the world. I summarise this work here, and in this lecture.
The full paper (with commentaries and reply) is available here, and summarised here. And here’s the full lecture.
MAC doesn’t predict that morality will be identical across cultures; rather it predicts that moral values will vary as a function of the value of different types of cooperation. We are currently testing theories of how morality varies by collecting new data on moral values using the MAC-Q in 40 Indo-European language groups.
KINDNESS
I’m Research Director for Kindlab, where we investigate the causes and consequences of kindness. We’re dedicated to answering questions like: Why are people kind? What stops people from being kind? How does kindness contribute to a happy and fulfilling life? What are the most effective ways to teach kindness? We conduct and fund research, promote public understanding, and build impactful real-world programs. This has included a meta-analysis showing that helping makes you happy, and designing LearnKind, an applied kindness program for schools. We are currently building a database of 1,000 acts of kindness, and developing The Kindness Index, a real-world measure of kindness.