Chapter 14 Morality, Altruism, and Cooperation

Question 1

What is moral dumbfounding?

Answer 1

It is an insistence on a moral conviction in the absence of reason, suggesting that gut feelings, or intuitions, guide many of our moral judgments.

Question 1

What is the central thesis of Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral judgment?

Answer 1

Our moral judgments are the product of fast, emotional intuitions, like gut feelings, which then influence how we reason about the issue in question.

we feel our way to our moral judgments; we don’t think our way there

Question 2

What is the theory that proposes that our moral judgments are shaped by deep intuitions with five universal foundations or domains?

Answer 2

Moral foundations theory

Question 3

What are the five foundations in the moral foundations theory?

Answer 3

1. Care/harm: a concern for the suffering of others, especially vulnerable individuals
   - emotion: sympathy
2. Fairness/reciprocity: concerns that others act in a just, equitable fashion, and it is triggered by unfair acts such as scamming and deceiving.
   - emotion: anger
3. Ingroup loyalty: the commitments we make to those in the groups we belong to
   - emotion: group pride (loyalty) or rage (betrayal)
4. Authority/respect: honoring one’s place in social hierarchies
   - emotion: embarrassment, shame, envy, and pride
5. Purity/sanctity: avoiding dangerous diseases and contaminants and socially impure ideas or actions.
   - emotion: disgust

Question 3

What is the difference between liberals and conservatives in their moral foundations?

Answer 3

Liberals attach a bit more importance to harm and fairness than conservatives do, whereas conservatives attach considerably more importance to authority, ingroup loyalty, and purity than liberals do.

e.g., climate change is framed as harm (to vanishing species) and care (of natural lands, oceans, and rain forests), therefore, it is more compelling to liberals

on the other hand, conservatives care more about purity (toxic clouds, dirty drinking water, and forests covered in garbage)

Question 3

How do you define altruism?

Answer 3

Prosocial behavior that benefits others without regard to the consequences for oneself

Question 3

What are the three motives behind altruistic actions?

Answer 3

1. Social reward (selfish) - being esteemed and valued by others in the form of praise, an award, or recognition can lead to our personal sacrifice of desirable goods
2. Personal distress (selfish), pain regions of our brain are activated when we watch someone else experience pain, therefore we help to alleviate our personal distress
3. Empathic concern: the feeling people experience when identifying with someone in need, accompanied by the intention to enhance the other person’s welfare

Question 3

Are humans born selfish?

Answer 3

No, nearly 70% of 14-month-olds will spontaneously assist an experimenter trying to pick up a pen.
The reward circuit of the brain is activated to the same degree as when they receive money.

Question 4

Do people do anonymous altruism?

Answer 4

Study showed that when participants empathize with someone who is in need, they engage in more altruistic action, even when their sacrifice is anonymous.

Question 4

What is the nerve involved when people are empathic or altruistic?

Answer 4

Recent empirical studies have found that the vagus nerve is engaged in both adults and children when they are feeling empathic concern (compassion), or performing acts of altruism

Question 4

What is the unpaid assistance when people help out with no expectation of receiving any compensation?

Answer 4

Volunteerism

Question 4

What are some factors than influence whether people will stop to help others?

Answer 4

1. the presence of other people
   - bystander intervention: assistance given by people who witness an emergency
   The presence of other bystanders at emergencies reduces the likelihood of helping because a diffusion of responsibility, assuming that others will help
2. victim characteristics
   - when the harm to victim is clear and the need is unambiguous, e.g., scream
   People are most likely to help others who are similar to them

Question 4

How to improve chances of getting help when you need it?

Answer 4

(1) make your need clear (“I’ve twisted my ankle and I can’t walk; I need help”) and (2) select a specific person (“You there, can you help me?”).

You prevent people from concluding there is no real emergency (thereby eliminating the effect of pluralistic ignorance), and you prevent them from thinking someone else will help (thereby overcoming diffusion of responsibility).

Question 4

What is the difference between pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility?

Answer 4

Pluralistic ignorance occurs when the seeming indifference of other people present causes a person to think that a situation isn’t an emergency even when it is.

Diffusion of responsibility occurs when the presence of others causes a person to think that someone else will help. Next time you see a person who needs help but you’re not sure if you should get involved, consider how these phenomena may be shaping your behavior.

Question 4

What is the relationship between altruism and rural settings?

Answer 4

People in rural areas report higher levels of empathic concern. Strangers are significantly more likely to be helped in rural communities than in urban areas.

potential reasons:
1. stimulus overload, the amount of stimulation in modern urban environments is so great that no one can register all of it.
2. diversity hypothesis, as people are more likely to help people who are similar to themselves, but urban areas are too diverse
3. diffusion of responsibility in urban settings
4. people may be observed more in rural areas and thus influence their reputation

Question 5

What is the relationship between social class and altruism?

Answer 5

When it comes to altruism, it turns out that those who have less give more, at least in terms of the proportion of their income that they donate to charity.

A relative scarcity of resources leads individuals to be more empathically attuned to others and to build strong relationships that help them adapt to their more unpredictable and threatening environments. On the other hand, rich people are less empathic.

People from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to act in a prosocial fashion. To encourage those who have more to give more, the answer is to trigger empathic concern in wealthy people.

Question 6

Do religion and ethics influence altruism?

Answer 6

People who were primed with religious concepts were more than 4 times as likely to treat a stranger as an equal by giving half of the money to the stranger (52 percent versus 12 percent).

Being primed with religious concepts leads to greater generosity.
An emphasis on fairness, cooperation, equality, seen in both religious traditions and secular treatments of ethics, can do a great deal to elicit prosocial behavior.

Question 7

How do evolutionary theorists explain altruistic behavior? (kin selection and reciprocity)

Answer 7

1. Kin selection is an evolutionary strategy that favors behaviors that increase the chance of survival of genetic relatives.
   Helping is more likely to be directed toward kin than toward non-kin
2. Reciprocity

Question 8

What is reciprocal altruism, according to evolutionary theorists?

Answer 8

Helping other people with the expectation that they’ll help in return at some other time

Reciprocal altruism reduces the likelihood of dangerous conflict, helps overcome problems arising from scarce resources, and offers a mechanism though which people can form alliances and constrain more dominant individuals.

Question 9

What is the prisoner’s dilemma?

Answer 9

A situation involving payoffs to two people who must decide whether to cooperate or defect. In the end, trust and cooperation lead to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and defects do.

People are more likely to cooperate with another person who smiles in a friendly fashion, laughs warmly, has a trustworthy-looking face, listens to others attentively, and has a physical appearance that resembles their own

Question 10

What does reputation refer to?

Answer 10

Reputation refers to the collective beliefs, evaluations, and impressions about an individual’s character that develop within a group or social network.

Question 11

Does training in the discipline of economics and its axioms of self-interest and independence encourage people to act more selfishly?

Answer 11

Yes. Seventy-two percent of the economics majors defected on their partners, whereas only 47 percent of those majoring in other disciplines defected.

Question 12

What is the tit-for-tat strategy?

Answer 12

It cooperates on the first round with every opponent and then reciprocates whatever the opponent did on the previous round. An opponent’s cooperation was rewarded with immediate cooperation; defection was punished with immediate defection.

start out cooperatively, and reciprocate your partner’s previous move.

Question 13

What type of culture is more likely to cooperate?

Answer 13

Henrich et al. (2001) found that greater interdependence in a culture predicted greater allocations to the stranger in the ultimatum game.

Question 14

What is the common resource pool dilemmas?

Answer 14

In a shared limited resources system, individuals, acting according to self-interest, deplete the shared resource and undermine the “common good”

e.g., tax evasion
water conservation
preservation of forests
Easter Island collapse
Climate change

Question 15

Possible ways to manage the commons dilemma?

Answer 15

No all-size fits all solution; adapt to local conditions
Understanding that resource can be depleted
Community with thick social networks and strong social norms in favour of responsible use
Instutions that monitor resource use
Graduated sanctions for overuse
Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are easy to access

Question 16

Some ways how culture has solved the problem of large scale cooperation?

Answer 16

Social monitoring institutions
Policing (Montreal’s “night of terror” Oct 7, 1969)
Police strike, riots, rooting, chaos
Suggests that the removal of police may cause chaos in society because norms alone cannot keep order
Markets and trading
Trading with people from other cultures and groups, treat other people with dignity and fairness
Indirect reciprocity
Direct: mutual help
Indirect: as a part of an ecosystem, trust level can ensure people help each other without the need for favoring back, e.g., Uber driver and client’s rating system builds reputation shared among them
Cooperative cultural norms (e.g., “Golden rule”)
Expansion of the moral circle through emotions such as empathy, compassion, guilt, shame
Supernatural policing