Kinship Intensity and the Use of Mental States in Moral Judgment Across Societies

Authors

Cameron M. Curtin, Harvard University
H. Clark Barrett, University of California, Los Angeles
Alexander Bolyanatz, College of DuPage
Alyssa N. Crittenden, University of Nevada, Las VegasFollow
Daniel M. T. Fessler, University of California, Los Angeles
Simon Fitzpatrick, John Carroll University
Michael Gurven, University of California, Santa Barbara
Martin Kanovsky, Comenius University
Geof Kushnick, Australian National University
Stephen Laurence, University of Sheffield
Anne Pisor, Washington State University
Brooke Scelza, University of California, Los Angeles
Stephen Stich, Rutgers University
Chris von Rueden, University of Richmond
Joseph Henrich, Harvard University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-12-2020

Publication Title

Evolution and Human Behavior

First page number:

1

Last page number:

15

Abstract

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum.

Keywords

Moral judgment; Mental states; Theory of mind; Kinship intensity; Cultural evolution; WEIRD

Disciplines

Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Language

English

Repository Citation

Curtin, C. M., Barrett, H., Bolyanatz, A., Crittenden, A. N., Fessler, D. M., Fitzpatrick, S., Gurven, M., Kanovsky, M., Kushnick, G., Laurence, S., Pisor, A., Scelza, B., Stich, S., von Rueden, C., Henrich, J. (2020). Kinship Intensity and the Use of Mental States in Moral Judgment Across Societies. Evolution and Human Behavior 1-15.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.002