Human nature is enigmatic. Are we cruel, selfish creatures or good merciful Samaritans? This book takes you on a journey into the complexities of human mind and kind, from altruism, sharing, and large-scale cooperation, to cheating, distrust, and warfare. What are the building blocks of morality and sociality? Featuring contributions from leading researchers, such as Christophe Boesch, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Azar Gat, Dennis Krebs, Ara Norenzayan, and Frans B. M. de Waal, this fascinating interdisciplinary reader draws on evolutionary and comparative perspectives, and is essential reading for any students interested in the unique characteristics that define humanity and society.
Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date reviews of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned chapters from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates, as well as a foundation for future research. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspective upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Book jacket.
Most works on moral psychology consider morality an unalloyed good. Drawing primarily on social-psychological theory and research, this book looks at morality as a problem. The problem is that we often fail live up to our own moral standards. Why?
Human nature is enigmatic. Are we cruel, selfish creatures or good merciful Samaritans? This book takes you on a journey into the complexities of human mind and kind, from altruism, sharing, and large-scale cooperation, to cheating, distrust, and warfare. What are the building blocks of morality and sociality? Featuring contributions from leading researchers, such as Christophe Boesch, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Azar Gat, Dennis Krebs, Ara Norenzayan, and Frans B. M. de Waal, this fascinating interdisciplinary reader draws on evolutionary and comparative perspectives, and is essential reading for any students interested in the unique characteristics that define humanity and society.
Ever since Plato’s ‘Republic’ was written over two thousand years ago, one of the main concerns of social philosophy and later empirical social science was to understand the moral nature of human beings. The faculty to think and act in terms of overarching moral values is as much a defining hallmark of our species as is our intelligence, so homo moralis is no less an appropriate term to describe humans as homo sapiens. This volume makes a case for the pivotal role of social psychology as the core discipline for studying morality. The book is divided into four parts. First, the role of social psychological processes in moral values and judgments is discussed, followed by an analysis of the role of morality in interpersonal processes. The sometimes paradoxical, ironic effects of moral beliefs are described next, and in the final section the role of morality in collective and group behavior is considered. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the social and behavioral sciences concerned with moral behavior, as well as professionals and practitioners in clinical, counseling, organizational, marketing and educational psychology where issues of ethics and morality are of importance.
'An immensely rich book.... The book is extremely careful, resourceful, and reasonable. It is essential reading for everyone interested in ethics.' -Mind
Human beings necessarily understand their social worlds in moral terms, orienting their lives, relationships, and activities around socially-produced notions of right and wrong. Morality is sociologically understood as more than simply helping or harming others; it encompasses any way that individuals form understandings of what behaviors are better than others, what goals are most laudable, and what "proper" people believe, feel, and do. Morality involves the explicit and implicit sets of rules and shared understandings that keep human social groups intact. Morality includes both the "shoulds" and "should nots" of human activity, its proactive and inhibitive elements. At one time, sociologists were centrally concerned with morality, issues like social cohesion, values, the goals and norms that structure society, and the ways individuals get socialized to reproduce those concerns. In the last half-century, however, explicit interest in these topics has waned, and modern sociology has become uninterested in these matters and morality has become marginalized within the discipline. But a resurgence in the topic is happening in related disciplines – psychology, neurology, philosophy, and anthropology - and in the wider national discourse. Sociology has much to offer, but is not fully engaged in this conversation. Many scholars work on areas that would fall under the umbrella of a sociology of morality but do not self-identify in such a manner, nor orient their efforts toward conceptualizing what we know, and should know, along these dimensions. The Handbook of the Sociology of Morality fills a niche within sociology making explicit the shared concerns of scholars across the disciplines as they relate to an often-overlooked dimension of human social life. It is unique in social science as it would be the first systematic compilation of the wider social structural, cultural, cross-national, organizational, and interactional dimension of human moral (understood broadly) thought, feeling, and behavior.
Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on experimental data comparing great apes and human children, he reconstructs two key evolutionary steps whereby early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species capable of acting as a plural agent “we”.
Positive Social Behavior and Morality: Social and Personal Influences, Volume I presents the broad range of influences that encourage or inhibit people to behave positively towards others and how varied forms of positive behavior are determined. The book examines the various aspects of positive social behavior. It starts by providing the definition, significance, and relationship of positive or prosocial behavior to morality. Topics on why people behave prosocially; the determinants of people helping other people in physical distress; effects of harm doing on prosocial behavior; the limitations of current methods; the goals for future study in the field of prosocial behavior; and a theoretical model for predicting prosocial behavior are presented as well. Psychologists, sociologists, researchers, and students in the field of sociology and psychology will find this book interesting.
The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four or five such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Colloquia are organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and discussions with a hundred or more researchers with an interest in the topic. Colloquia presentations are recorded and posted on the National Academy of Sciences Sackler colloquia website and published on CD-ROM. These Colloquia are made possible by a generous gift from Mrs. Jill Sackler, in memory of her husband, Arthur M. Sackler.
