Moral action as cheater suppression in human super organisms: Testing the human superorganism approach to morality

Abstract

'For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort]; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.' (Aristotle, The Politics 37)Aristotle. The Politics. Trans. Carnes Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. AbstractLarge-scale human groups cannot rely on shared genetic interests or dyadic reciprocity to ensure social cohesion as genetic similarity is low and indirect reciprocity is rife; nevertheless, such societies continue to cohere, due to the evolution of novel regulatory mechanisms that inhibit defaulting on social obligations: moral sentiments and actions. The present paper argues that the extent of moral concern can be most usefully identified by defining the set of functions required to sustain a human 'superorganism'. These functions are determined to be boundary, production, distribution, storage, control, structure, enforcement, signaling, memory, excretion, perception and reproductive functions. Moral obligations to act arise when individuals default on contributing to these functions. To test this approach, roughly 80,000 respondents from over 200 countries completed a web-based experiment hosted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). This experiment elicited a suite of responses to a set of 33 short scenarios derived from the 13 domains of superorganism function. Results indicate that all functions are moralized, while violations falling outside this domain (social conventions and individual decisions) are not. People living in larger communities exhibited stronger moral sentiments and action propensities, consistent with the greater interdependence of living in groups with more social roles. Such people were also more likely to see the function of the justice system as supporting group-level protection rather than personal recrimination or restitution, were more willing to engage in punishment of those who failed to punish cheaters, and more offended by those who choose not to contribute to social welfare. These results support the contention of Human Superorganism Theory that large-scale human groups strongly rely on moral propensities to regulate those who fail to perform superorganismal functions. Given this supporting evidence, we believe this new approach to defining the moral domain has implications for fields ranging from psychology to legal theory. Defining the moral domainUntil recently, morality was largely the domain of philosophers. A typical debate might involve defining why killing another human being is wrong (taken as one of the foundations for a good society). Answers might include: because it will destabilize society and lead to general unhappiness (the consequentialist position of Berkeley), or because it violates the Golden Rule of doing to others what we would want them to do to us (subscribed to by deontologists like Kant), or because people of good upbringing and hence virtuous character would not be inclined to do so (the posi...

“If it looks like a duck…” – why humans need to focus on different approaches than insects if we are to become efficiently and effectively ultrasocial

“…During the agricultural revolutions of humans and social insects, as described by Gowdy & Krall (G&K), further similarities ensued: Both groups developed larger colony sizes, with more-extensive divisions of labor and interdependencies among workers. These convergences indicate that humans and social insects have shared a broadly overlapping suite of selective pressures for millennia, especially with regard to colony-level selection, which corresponds, in humans, to selection among different cultural groups (Aunger & Greenland 2014;Crespi 2014;Kesebir 2012).…”

“…Enter culture, our human-evolutionary trump card, and re-enter religion. Primary effects of religious cognition, behavior, and institutions include the generation of psychological kinship, the unification of within-group interests, and the establishment of moral codes to suppress cheating (Aunger & Greenland 2014;Crespi & Summers 2014). With the emergence of agriculture, human groups increased greatly in size, and religions and gods also got big, as monotheistic, highly moralizing religions supplanted their predecessors (Norenzayan 2013).…”

Moral action as cheater suppression in human super organisms: Testing the human superorganism approach to morality

“…[42][43][44] The idea has also been extended to human social groups. [45][46][47][48][49][50] However, the extent to which human societies cohere is less than that seen in eusocial insects (which have the advantage of high levels of average kinship). Thus we might say that the human superorganism is relatively 'crude'.…”

The convergent and divergent evolution of social-behavioral economics

“…During the agricultural revolutions of humans and social insects, as described by Gowdy & Krall (G&K), further similarities ensued: Both groups developed larger colony sizes, with more-extensive divisions of labor and interdependencies among workers. These convergences indicate that humans and social insects have shared a broadly overlapping suite of selective pressures for millennia, especially with regard to colony-level selection, which corresponds, in humans, to selection among different cultural groups (Aunger & Greenland 2014; Crespi 2014; Kesebir 2012).…”

“…Enter culture, our human-evolutionary trump card, and re-enter religion. Primary effects of religious cognition, behavior, and institutions include the generation of psychological kinship, the unification of within-group interests, and the establishment of moral codes to suppress cheating (Aunger & Greenland 2014; Crespi & Summers 2014). With the emergence of agriculture, human groups increased greatly in size, and religions and gods also got big, as monotheistic, highly moralizing religions supplanted their predecessors (Norenzayan 2013).…”