Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment
Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment

Author: Randolph Nesse

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2001-11-29

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1610444256

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Commitment is at the core of social life. The social fabric is woven from promises and threats that are not always immediately advantageous to the parties involved. Many commitments, such as signing a contract, are fairly straightforward deals, in which both parties agree to give up certain options. Other commitments, such as the promise of life-long love or a threat of murder, are based on more intangible factors such as human emotions. In Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, distinguished researchers from the fields of economics, psychology, ethology, anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and law offer a rich variety of perspectives on the nature of commitment and question whether the capacity for making, assessing, and keeping commitments has been shaped by natural selection. Game theorists have shown that players who use commitment strategies—by learning to convey subjective offers and to gauge commitments others are willing to make—achieve greater success than those who rationally calculate every move for immediate reward. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment includes contributions from some of the pioneering students of commitment. Their elegant analyses highlight the critical role of reputation-building, and show the importance of investigating how people can believe that others would carry out promises or threats that go against their own self-interest. Other contributors provide real-world examples of commitment across cultures and suggest the evolutionary origins of the capacity for commitment. Perhaps nowhere is the importance of commitment and reputation more evident than in the institutions of law, medicine, and religion. Essays by professionals in each field explore why many practitioners remain largely ethical in spite of manifest opportunities for client exploitation. Finally, Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment turns to leading animal behavior experts to explore whether non-humans also use commitment strategies, most notably through the transmission of threats or signs of non-aggression. Such examples illustrate how such tendencies in humans may have evolved. Viewed as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, commitment offers enormous potential for explaining complex and irrational emotional behaviors within a biological framework. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment presents compelling evidence for this view, and offers a potential bridge across the current rift between biology and the social sciences. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment
Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment

Author: Randolph M. Nesse

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2001-11-29

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780871546227

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Commitment is at the core of social life. The social fabric is woven from promises and threats that are not always immediately advantageous to the parties involved. Many commitments, such as signing a contract, are fairly straightforward deals, in which both parties agree to give up certain options. Other commitments, such as the promise of life-long love or a threat of murder, are based on more intangible factors such as human emotions. In Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, distinguished researchers from the fields of economics, psychology, ethology, anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and law offer a rich variety of perspectives on the nature of commitment and question whether the capacity for making, assessing, and keeping commitments has been shaped by natural selection. Game theorists have shown that players who use commitment strategies—by learning to convey subjective offers and to gauge commitments others are willing to make—achieve greater success than those who rationally calculate every move for immediate reward. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment includes contributions from some of the pioneering students of commitment. Their elegant analyses highlight the critical role of reputation-building, and show the importance of investigating how people can believe that others would carry out promises or threats that go against their own self-interest. Other contributors provide real-world examples of commitment across cultures and suggest the evolutionary origins of the capacity for commitment. Perhaps nowhere is the importance of commitment and reputation more evident than in the institutions of law, medicine, and religion. Essays by professionals in each field explore why many practitioners remain largely ethical in spite of manifest opportunities for client exploitation. Finally, Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment turns to leading animal behavior experts to explore whether non-humans also use commitment strategies, most notably through the transmission of threats or signs of non-aggression. Such examples illustrate how such tendencies in humans may have evolved. Viewed as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, commitment offers enormous potential for explaining complex and irrational emotional behaviors within a biological framework. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment presents compelling evidence for this view, and offers a potential bridge across the current rift between biology and the social sciences. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

Intention Recognition, Commitment and Their Roles in the Evolution of Cooperation
Intention Recognition, Commitment and Their Roles in the Evolution of Cooperation

Author: The Anh Han

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-04-11

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 364237512X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This original and timely monograph describes a unique self-contained excursion that reveals to the readers the roles of two basic cognitive abilities, i.e. intention recognition and arranging commitments, in the evolution of cooperative behavior. This book analyses intention recognition, an important ability that helps agents predict others’ behavior, in its artificial intelligence and evolutionary computational modeling aspects, and proposes a novel intention recognition method. Furthermore, the book presents a new framework for intention-based decision making and illustrates several ways in which an ability to recognize intentions of others can enhance a decision making process. By employing the new intention recognition method and the tools of evolutionary game theory, this book introduces computational models demonstrating that intention recognition promotes the emergence of cooperation within populations of self-regarding agents. Finally, the book describes how commitment provides a pathway to the evolution of cooperative behavior, and how it further empowers intention recognition, thereby leading to a combined improved strategy.

The Oxford Handbook of Secularism
The Oxford Handbook of Secularism

Author: Phil Zuckerman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 793

ISBN-13: 0199988455

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As recent headlines reveal, conflicts and debates around the world increasingly involve secularism. National borders and traditional religions cannot keep people in tidy boxes as political struggles, doctrinal divergences, and demographic trends are sweeping across regions and entire continents. And secularity is increasing in society, with a growing number of people in many regions having no religious affiliation or lacking interest in religion. Simultaneously, there is a resurgence of religious participation in the politics of many countries. How might these diverse phenomena be better understood? Long-reigning theories about the pace of secularization and ideal church-state relations are under invigorated scrutiny by scholars studying secularism with new questions, better data, and fresh perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Secularism offers a wide-ranging and in-depth examination of this global conversation, bringing together the views of an international collection of prominent experts in their respective fields. This is the essential volume for comprehending the core issues and methodological approaches to the demographics and sociology of secularity; the history and variety of political secularisms; the comparison of constitutional secularisms across many countries from America to Asia; the key problems now convulsing church-state relations; the intersections of liberalism, multiculturalism, and religion; the latest psychological research into secular lives and lifestyles; and the naturalistic and humanistic worldviews available to nonreligious people.

The Moral Brain
The Moral Brain

Author: Jan Verplaetse

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-08-21

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1402062877

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Scientists no longer accept the existence of a distinct moral organ as phrenologists once did. A generation of young neurologists is using advanced technological medical equipment to unravel specific brain processes enabling moral cognition. In addition, evolutionary psychologists have formulated hypotheses about the origins and nature of our moral architecture. Little by little, the concept of a ‘moral brain’ is reinstated. As the crossover between disciplines focusing on moral cognition was rather limited up to now, this book aims at filling the gap. Which evolutionary biological hypotheses provide a useful framework for starting new neurological research? How can brain imaging be used to corroborate hypotheses concerning the evolutionary background of our species? In this reader, a broad range of prominent scientists and philosophers shed their expert view on the current accomplishments and future challenges in the field of moral cognition and assess how cooperation between neurology and evolutionary psychology can boost research into the field of the moral brain.

Evolutionary Psychology, Public Policy and Personal Decisions
Evolutionary Psychology, Public Policy and Personal Decisions

Author: Charles Crawford

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2004-05-20

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1135629188

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume's aim is to start the process of using theory and findings of evolutionary psychology to help make the world a better place to live. Taking evolutionary psychology explicitly into applied areas, it includes a reasonable scope of applications from pornography to psychopaths and from morality to sex differences in the workplace.

The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion
The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion

Author: Yair Lior

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 756

ISBN-13: 1000638413

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in evolutionary and scientific approaches to religion. The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting and emerging field. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook pulls together scholarship in the following areas: evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR) cultural evolution the complementarity of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and cultural evolution Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: Cliodynamics, cultural group selection, costly signaling, dual inheritance theory, literacy, transmitting narratives, prosociality, supernatural punishment, cognition and ritual, meme theory, fusion theory, sexual selection, agency detection, evoked culture, social brain hypothesis, theory of mind, developmental psychology, emergence theory, social learning, cultural cybernetics, cultural epidemiology, evolutionary and cultural psychology, memetics, by-product and adaptationist theories of religion, systems and information theory, and computer modeling. This Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and anthropology. It will also be very useful to those in related fields, such as psychology, sociology of religion, cognitive biology, and evolutionary biology.

Back to Human Nature
Back to Human Nature

Author: Charles B. Osburn

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1476640211

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Emotions, feelings and morality play a critical role in our daily decision-making. With the rapid advance of industry and technology, however, this subjective information is becoming less valued in critical decisions. Rational thought and the accumulation of objective knowledge are often credited with humanity's thriving success in recent centuries. This book makes the case that humanity's social progress has only been possible through these too often repressed subjective factors, and will be equally crucial in altering the present course of society.

Moving Beyond Self-Interest
Moving Beyond Self-Interest

Author: Stephanie L. Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-10-26

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0195388100

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Moving Beyond Self-Interest is an interdisciplinary volume that discusses cutting-edge developments in the science of caring for and helping others. In Part I, contributors raise foundational issues related to human caregiving. They present new theories and data to show how natural selection might have shaped a genuinely altruistic drive to benefit others, how this drive intersects with the attachment and caregiving systems, and how it emerges from a broader social engagement system made possible by symbiotic regulation of autonomic physiological states. In Part II, contributors propose a new neurophysiological model of the human caregiving system and present arguments and evidence to show how mammalian neural circuitry that supports parenting might be recruited to direct human cooperation and competition, human empathy, and parental and romantic love. Part III is devoted to the psychology of human caregiving. Some contributors in this section show how an evolutionary perspective helps us better understand parental investment in and empathic concern for children at risk for, or suffering from, various health, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Other contributors identify circumstances that differentially predict caregiver benefits and costs, and raise the question of whether extreme levels of compassion are actually pathological. The section concludes with a discussion of semantic and conceptual obstacles to the scientific investigation of caregiving. Part IV focuses on possible interfaces between new models of caregiving motivation and economics, political science, and social policy development. In this section, contributors show how the new theory and research discussed in this volume can inform our understanding of economic utility, policies for delivering social services (such as health care and education), and hypotheses concerning the origins and development of human society, including some of its more problematic features of nationalism, conflict, and war. The chapters in this volume help readers appreciate the human capacity for engaging in altruistic acts, on both a small and large scale.

Science and the World's Religions
Science and the World's Religions

Author: Patrick McNamara Ph.D.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-07-19

Total Pages: 1048

ISBN-13: 0313387338

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This trio of volumes contains essays that explore vital existential, moral, or metaphysical issues surrounding the relationship between the sciences and the world's religions. In Science and the World's Religions, experts with scientific and religious backgrounds explore vital existential or practical issues, drawing on whatever sciences are relevant and engaging at least two religious traditions. The multidisciplinary essays exhibit rigorous intellectual, scholarly thinking but are written to clearly communicate to educated adult lay readers. The first volume addresses questions about the origins and purpose of the cosmos and the human project. The second volume investigates the roles of religion and spirituality in human existence, considering issues ranging from the brain and religious experience to the human life cycle. The third volume tackles controversies in which both religion and science are stakeholders, showing how both can deepen understanding and enrich human experience. Together, these three books present readers with powerful tools that enable them to think through the challenge of integrating science with their religious beliefs and spiritual practices.