Does altruism and morality lead to socially better outcomes in strategic interactions than selfishness? We shed some light on this complex and non-trivial issue by examining a few canonical strategic interactions played by egoists, altruists and moralists. By altruists, we mean people who do not only care about their own material payoffs but also about those to others, and, by a moralist, we me...

Previous research has revealed that people value morality as a more important person characteristic than competence. In this study, we tested whether people adjust their less explicit behavior more to moral than competence values. Participants performed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that was either framed as a test of their morality or as a test of their competence. The behavioral results ...

1 Introduction Morality is one of the few topics in academe endowed with its own protective spell. A biologist is not blinded by her biological nature to the workings of biology. An economist is not confused by his own economic activity when he tries to understand the workings of markets 1. But students of morality are often biased by their own moral commitments. Morality is so contested and so...

Traditional conservative arguments against the possibility of major moral progress or fundamental institutional reform relied on under-evidenced assumptions about the limitations of human nature. A number of contemporary thinkers from a variety of disciplines have attempted to fill this empirical gap in the conservative argument by appealing to evolutionary theory. These “evoconservatives” infe...

1 Introduction Morality is one of the few topics in academe endowed with its own protective spell. A biologist is not blinded by her biological nature to the workings of biology. An economist is not confused by his own economic activity when he tries to understand the workings of markets 1. But students of morality are often biased by their own moral commitments. Morality is so contested and so...

This study examines homeroom teachers’ motivation and morality in their classroom-level leadership China. Data are drawn from questionnaires completed by 137 junior middle school teachers Tianjin city, semi-structured interviews with 10 of them. The participating saw themselves as having high levels both teacher morality. And the variable – a master’s degree have significant correlations percep...

It appears that there are two universal dimensions of social cognition, capturing a person’s intention to be good or to do good things (i.e., morality) and his or her capacity to carry out his or her intentions (i.e., competence, or Heider’s “can”). Perceivers are strongly biased towards the former dimension, as they are more likely to seek out and act upon information concerning a person’s mor...

Musical theory has built on the premise that musical structures can refer to something different from themselves (Nattiez and Abbate, 1990). The aim of this work is to statistically corroborate the intuitions of musical thinkers and practitioners starting at least with Plato, that music can express complex human concepts beyond merely "happy" and "sad" (Mattheson and Lenneberg, 1958). To do so,...

Ever since Aristotle, moral philosophers, including David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edward Westermarck, have argued that there are two distinct layers to human morality: (1) moral emotions or sentiments and (2) the capacity for moral judgment and reasoning. We tend to focus on this first layer when we compare humans with other animals because it is closer to direct behavioural expression, hence eas...