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March 2013Volume 34, Issue 2, Pages 78–85
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Moralization as protection against exploitation: do individuals without allies moralize more?

Michael Bang Petersen
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Michael Bang Petersen
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Michael Bang Petersen
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Correspondence

  • Corresponding author.
Aarhus University, Department of Political Science and Government, Bartholins Allé 7, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
Moralization as protection against exploitation: do individuals without allies moralize more?
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.09.006

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Figures

Fig. 1

Predicted levels of moralization in the mating and cooperation domains conditioned by investment strategy and social support from friends.

Abstract

Over the course of human evolutionary history, individuals have required protection from other individuals who sought to exploit them. Moralization – broadcasting relevant behaviors as immoral – is proposed as a strategy whereby individuals attempt to engage third parties in the protection against exploitation. Whereas previous accounts of strategic morality have focused on the effect of individual differences in mating strategies, we here argue for the importance of another factor: differences in the availability of alternative sources of protection. Given the potential costs of moralization, it is predicted that it is primarily used among individuals lacking protection in the form of social allies. Consistent with this, a large cross-national set of surveys is used to reveal how individuals without friends moralize more. In contrast, however, support from other social sources such as family or religious individuals increases moralization.

Keywords:

Morality, Third-party punishment, Friends, Formidability

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1This effect is related to at least two features that bystanders can gauge from a signal of moral outrage. First, outrage reveals that the sender believes that the target act indirectly hurts his or her interests. Given the complexities of human social interaction, it is individually difficult to constantly monitor downstream welfare effects of each and every action that others engage in and, hence, any information about other people's assessments in this regard should be valuable. The role of these kinds of social learning effects is evident in, for example, the literature on bystander effects, where bystanders take cues from others about whether to intervene (see in particular Dedrick, 1978 ). Second, outrage provides a credible signal that the sender is willing to engage in third-party punishment (cf. Frank, 1988 ), thereby lowering the costs of others to join to effectively deter the relevant class of acts. In this regard, it is also of key importance to notice that if coordination should be orchestrated de novo each and every time a relevant exploitive act was undertaken, costs would be massive ( Tooby et al., 2006 ). One way of countering such costs comes from humans’ exceptional cognitive skills for building and committing to social norms in the sense of shared expectations ( O'Gorman, Wilson, & Miller, 2008 ). To counter the coordination costs in relation to the coordination of third-party punishment, it is, in other words, plausible that group members recognize and react on the basis of a momentarily stable “portfolio” (i.e., mental catalogue) of goods that a sufficient part of the collective recognizes as so valuable that it is prudent to deter acts that target them through coordinated punishment. On the one hand, the existence of such a portfolio provides a public good in that everybody enjoys the benefits of deterrence. In this regard, it is also important to recognize that the effectiveness of punishment and the coordination problems related to moving new acts into the portfolio imply that whenever coordination is achieved and the collective locks in to deter a particular class of exploitive acts, it could pay for individuals to join in and support coordinated punishment, even if they would themselves have prioritized deterring another class of acts ( DeScioli & Kurzban, 2012 ).
2Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Belarus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Ukraine.
3The exact number of participants used in each test varies, however, as some of the other variables were included in a fewer country surveys. Hence, Ns are consistently reported for each performed test.
© 2013 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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March 2013Volume 34, Issue 2, Pages 78–85