In his elegant discussion, Sripada distinguishes three possible innate bases for aspects of morality: (1) certain specific principles might be innate, (2) a less simple “principles and parameters” model might apply, and (3) innate biases might have have some influence over what morality a person acquires without determining the content of that morality.1 He argues against (1) and (2) and in fav...

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...

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is considered one of the "fathers" of sociology because of his effort to establish sociology as a discipline distinct from philosophy and psychology. This effort is evident in the two main themes that permeate Durkheim's work: the priority of the social over the individual and the idea that society can be studied scientifically. Durkheim's concept of social facts, in ...

Children and adolescents evaluated group inclusion and exclusion in the context of generic and group-specific norms involving morality and social conventions. Participants (N = 381), aged 9.5 and 13.5 years, judged an in-group member's decision to deviate from the norms of the group, whom to include, and whether their personal preference was the same as what they expected a group should do. Dev...

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...

The present study attempts to optimize the outflow and the water distribution of entire Damodar catchment with the help of Artificial Neural Network(ANN). It is worth to mention that the large river valley project like Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) with four dams and one barrage makes the simulation of Damodar more challenging, as it becomes a controlled flow system. Event of heavy floods ar...

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...

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...