Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Moral psychology — morality as a natural phenomenon — moral judgement, emotion and norms, and their evolution, development and variation across cultures; descriptive, where ethics is normative (group: philosophy; ADR-018).
43 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-047 v3 | Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies | Curry et al. (2019), DOI-10.1086/701478. Coding 3,460 eHRAF paragraphs on the 60 Probability Sample Files societies found 962 morally valenced mentions of seven cooperative behaviours, 961 of them positive. The one negative is Chuuk admiration of open theft as dominance. Presence varied widely by domain: property 54/60 (90%), kin 47 (78%), group 44 (73%), reciprocity 43 (72%), respect 35 (58%), bravery 32 (53%), fairness 9 (15%). Presence correlated with ethnographic coverage (r = 0.43). The design can detect a morally positive mention but has almost no way to register a negative one, so the 99.9% is weak evidence for universality. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-034); the clearest statement of morality-as-cooperation, with an unusually good commentary set (Bloom; Smith & Kurzban; Wong) that states the objections exactly. Its empirical test is weakly diagnostic: the codebook defines the behaviours in virtue terms, the authors’ footnote 3 recodes conflicts as cooperation-vs-cooperation, and the first-pass selection was not blind. It would be settled by blind coding of all moralized content in the same sample, testing whether non-cooperative domains (purity, sex, harm) are moralized as often. |
| LIT-101 v2 | Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality | Fitouchi et al. (2021), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X22002047. Puritanical norms (condemning lust, gluttony, intoxicants, immodesty, idleness; praising temperance and piety) are argued to be cooperative morality after all: people believe cooperation needs self-control and that indulgence erodes it (and discipline trains it), so a single harm/fairness-sensitive moral system condemns victimless pleasures as indirect, probabilistic threats to cooperation. Its decline in rich societies is put down to people seeing others as already self-controlled and trustworthy. The theory is explicitly agnostic about whether the norms actually work. Its most direct support is the authors’ own vignette studies (N > 1,100), in which perceived loss of self-control mediated 100% of the perceived effect of indulgence on cooperativeness. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-132); worth reading as a clearly stated, falsifiable, well-sourced BBS target theory of why “purity” norms exist. Much of its evidence is correlational or the authors’ own vignettes, and several predictions (intoxicants, piety) are explicitly untested. |
| LIT-125 v2 | The moral psychology of obligation | Tomasello (2019), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X19001742. Tomasello proposes that the human sense of obligation is “the internalized social/rational pressure from a joint or collective self-regulating agent ‘we’… to do what ‘we’ expect me to” (§3). It arises first, around age 3, inside joint-commitment collaboration with a partner, and then, from about 3–5 years, toward in-group members through collective identification. It is a “self-conscious motivation” whose coercive force is a threat to one’s cooperative identity. The support is a synthesis of developmental and comparative experiments, mostly from his own lab, on WEIRD children versus chimpanzees; the paper runs no new experiment. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-185); worth reading as the standard statement of the shared-intentionality account of obligation and, above all, as a treatment. The commentaries by Bratman, Darwall, Gilbert and Pettit, and the response, are where the naturalistic claim is actually contested. The target article alone is a review-cum-hypothesis, not a demonstration. |
| LIT-493 v2 | The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms | Bicchieri (2006; print December 2005), DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511616037. Per its publisher, an integrated account, drawing on social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, of how social norms such as fairness, cooperation and reciprocity emerge, why and when people follow them, when they attend to the relevant norm, why inefficient norms survive, and how psychological dispositions can lead to fairness norms like ours. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Cambridge Core is paywalled. The author’s own copy of chapter 1 on her University of Pennsylvania pages and the publisher’s excerpt at assets.cambridge.org both failed (HTTP 403; connection reset), and the Internet Archive has no copy. It is the standard equilibrium-and-expectations account of social norms; what its definition of a norm says was not seen. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-494 v3 | The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm | Schein & Gray (2018), DOI-10.1177/1088868317698288. By its abstract: harm is an intuitively perceived continuum, not an objective matter, and acts are condemned in proportion to norm violation, negative affect and perceived harm, where harm is dyadic (an intentional agent damaging a vulnerable patient). Harm leads to condemnation and condemnation to perceived harm (the “dyadic loop”). The theory argues against intuitively harmless wrongs and modular foundations. Unread: the argument and evidence are not known here. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-02 from the PubMed abstract and Crossref record, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The SAGE PDF, listed as free to read, sits behind a bot challenge (HTTP 403); the PubMed record has no PMC copy; a University of North Carolina repository file returned by a search for the paper (cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/w9505f334) reset every connection, so what it holds is unknown; Semantic Scholar points only to the SAGE PDF, and CORE, OpenAlex and the Wayback Machine had no copy. It is the main harm-based rival to morality-as-cooperation, and what it argues is known here only from its abstract and from how other readings in this batch describe it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. Free copy: doi:10.1177/1088868317698288 (SAGE’s PDF, listed as free to read). |
| LIT-495 v2 | The Biology of Moral Systems | Alexander (1987), DOI-10.4324/9780203700976 (the 2017 Routledge reissue). By the publisher’s account, moral questions arise from conflicts of interest, and moral systems use confluences of interest at lower levels of organization to manage conflicts at higher ones; they are “systems of indirect reciprocity”, run on reputation, and morality arose within groups for unity in intergroup competition. Unread: filed from the publisher’s description and chapter titles. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The 1987 Aldine de Gruyter edition is lending-only at the Internet Archive (access-restricted, printdisabled), and the 2017 Routledge reissue is paywalled. A complete scan posted on a course blog was found and not used, since posting a whole in-copyright book is not a lawful copy. What the book argues is known here only from the publisher’s description and from Nowak 2006 (LIT-501), which cites it for the claim that indirect reciprocity leads to morality; both are labelled as theirs. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-496 | Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of ‘morality-as-cooperation’ with a new questionnaire | Curry, Jones Chesters & Van Lissa (2019), DOI-10.1016/j.jrp.2018.10.008. The Morality-as-Cooperation Questionnaire, 21 Relevance and 21 Judgement items for seven domains, tested in UK (n = 1,392) and US (n = 469) online samples against the MFQ (UK n = 1,042). Seven factors fit the Relevance items (CFI .98) but not the Judgement items (CFI .87), and the combined seven-domain model is rejected (CFI .73). The MFQ’s five factors fit worse. MFQ purity items are rated about as morally relevant as its loyalty and authority items, which the authors concede contradicts the theory. | Proposed — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-412), from the PsyArXiv manuscript; worth reading as the programme’s psychometric test and as the place its authors concede that purity items are rated morally relevant, which “appear[s] to contradict” the theory. Its seven-factor result is weaker than the abstract says. The items were written by the authors, three per domain, from the theory itself, and selected by fit within each domain. Seven factors then fit the Relevance items but not the Judgement items, and the combined seven-domain model is rejected (CFI .73), so the best model has fourteen correlated factors. No non-cooperative item is in the MAC-Q, so it cannot test whether morality is only about cooperation. It would be settled by an item pool written independently of the theory, with harm, purity and other non-cooperative content in it, factored blind, on data that can be shared. |
| LIT-499 | Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism | Graham et al. (2013), DOI-10.1016/B978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4. Moral Foundations Theory in full: a nativist, cultural-developmental, intuitionist and pluralist account with five foundations (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity), each tied to an adaptive challenge and an existing evolutionary model. A decade of MFQ work finds liberals rely on Care and Fairness, conservatives on all five, across 12 world regions. Five criteria for “foundationhood” are proposed, and Liberty, Efficiency, Ownership and Honesty are named candidates. Harm monism (Gray) and fairness monism (Baumard) are rejected as Procrustean. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-396); worth reading as the full statement of Moral Foundations Theory and as the text to check morality-as-cooperation’s comparison against. It states the theory’s four claims (nativism, cultural learning, intuitionism, pluralism), reviews a decade of MFQ findings, mostly on political ideology, and offers five criteria for what counts as a foundation. By its own table the Care foundation rests on kin selection and Fairness on Trivers’ reciprocal altruism, and Ownership/theft is already a named candidate, so the claim that MFT omits kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and property does not survive this text. Sanctity, the foundation morality-as-cooperation excludes, is by the same table the one with the least evidence of innate preparedness. |
| LIT-500 | Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures | Atari et al. (2023), DOI-10.1037/pspp0000470. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2: 36 items, six per foundation, for Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, built and tested on 25 populations (N ≈ 8,700) in local languages. Equality and Proportionality correlate weakly (mean r = .21). Purity is the foundation most related to cultural distance from the U.S. (r = .43) and to religiosity. The individualizing–binding split appears in only three of 19 national networks. The MFQ-2 explains more variance in 30 criterion scores than the MFQ-1 (mean adjusted R² .37 against .30). | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-398), from the APA accepted manuscript; worth reading as the current Moral Foundations measure (the MFQ-2) and the theory’s current list of six foundations, with Fairness split into Equality and Proportionality, and as the place MFT answers morality-as-cooperation directly: Curry et al. 2019 “left out Purity as an important and less-WEIRD moral foundation”. Its strongest evidence for that, Purity’s association with cultural distance from the U.S., rests on the one subscale that fails its own measurement-invariance threshold. Its samples are online panels in 25 populations, not small-scale societies. |
| LIT-502 | Intuitive ethics: how innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues | Haidt & Joseph (2004), DOI-10.1162/0011526042365555. Proposes that people are innately prepared to feel flashes of approval or disapproval at four patterns: suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity and purity, with ingroup the best candidate for a fifth (fn. 15). Each is a module with a proper domain it evolved for (one’s own child in distress; cheating in joint ventures; disease and waste) and a culturally widened actual domain. Cultures build virtues on these intuitions and differ in which they use. The four were chosen by counting which concerns appeared in five surveyed works; the essay reports no data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-400); worth reading as the founding statement of Moral Foundations Theory, and as the text morality-as-cooperation quotes when it calls purity non-cooperative. It proposes four innately prepared intuition “modules” (suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, purity), with ingroup as a likely fifth in a footnote, and argues that cultures build virtues on them. The list comes from tallying five books, not from data, and no study is reported. It already grounds the suffering module in care for one’s own children and the reciprocity module in Trivers, so the later charge that the foundations omit kin and reciprocal altruism does not fit this text. |
| LIT-503 | Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach | Curry (2016), DOI-10.1007/978-3-319-19671-8_2. Morality is “a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social life”. Nonzero-sum game theory yields seven problems (kin, coordination, exchange, hawkish and dovish contest displays, division, possession) and hence seven moral domains, illustrated but not tested. The chapter predicts that non-cooperative behaviour is morally neutral everywhere, and that MFT’s purity domain has no connection to cooperation. | Proposed — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-408); the founding statement of morality-as-cooperation and the place its predictions are stated most sharply, including the one its own tests have not run: that behaviour unrelated to cooperation will be morally neutral, and that no culture’s morality will be about “aesthetics or nutrition” (p. 40). It reports no data. The seven domains are derived from game theory and then illustrated with quotations from philosophers and ethnographers, so the chapter shows the taxonomy is coherent, not that it is the right one. It would be settled by the test LIT-047 lacks: blind coding of all moralized content in one sample, asking whether non-cooperative domains are moralized. |
| LIT-504 v2 | A Natural History of Human Morality | Tomasello (2016), DOI-10.4159/9780674915855. By the publisher’s account, a reconstruction from experiments comparing great apes and children of how early humans became “an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species”. The chapter titles give the steps: an interdependence hypothesis, a second-personal morality of collaborating partners, an “objective” morality of the cultural group, and human morality as “cooperation-plus”. Unread: filed from the description and chapter list. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The book is lending-only at the Internet Archive (access-restricted, printdisabled) and paywalled at Harvard University Press and De Gruyter. Its relation to Tomasello’s later “The moral psychology of obligation” (LIT-125, read in NOTE-185) is inferred from the chapter titles and that reading, and is labelled as inference. An author’s précis exists (Philosophical Psychology, 2018, DOI 10.1080/09515089.2018.1486605) and was not read; it would be the natural first step. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-507 | Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality | Rai & Fiske (2011), DOI-10.1037/a0021867. Relationship regulation theory: moral judgments are not about features of acts (harm, unfairness, impurity) but about whether acts fit the relationship model in force. Fiske’s four relational models each carry a moral motive: Unity (communal sharing), Hierarchy (authority ranking), Equality (equality matching) and Proportionality (market pricing). The motives are universal; cultures differ in where they apply them. So violence, inequality and “impure” acts can be morally required, and purity and ingroup loyalty are one motive. A review, with no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-405); worth reading as the relational alternative to both Moral Foundations Theory and morality-as-cooperation, and as the source of the Equality/Proportionality split the MFQ-2 later adopted. It is a theoretical review with no new data. It agrees with morality-as-cooperation that morality exists to sustain cooperative relationships, and differs from it on purity (a Unity motive, the same motive as ingroup loyalty), on harm (violence can be morally required) and on the units (four relational models, not seven game-theoretic problems). |
| LIT-508 | A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice | Baumard, André & Sperber (2013), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X11002202. When individuals can choose partners and have equal outside options, a split that gives one side less than it could get elsewhere is not stable, so partner choice selects for sharing the gains of cooperation in proportion to contribution. Competition to be chosen then favours a genuine, non-instrumental sense of fairness. Economic-game results (entitlement effects, merit-based division, need-based mutual aid, proportionate punishment) are reinterpreted as fairness, not altruism. Morality is defined as fairness; kin care and group loyalty are not intrinsically moral. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-407), with all 28 open peer commentaries and the authors’ Response; worth reading as the strongest single-mechanism cooperative theory of morality and as the parent of moral disciplining (LIT-101). It is a cooperation theory that cuts the other way from morality-as-cooperation: partner choice selects one moral sense, fairness, and kin care and group loyalty are not intrinsically moral. Its evidence is a reinterpretation of others’ economic-game results, and its central formal claim is cited from the authors’ separate model. The commentaries (Graham, Ramlakhan & Brook, Machery & Stich, Sachdeva et al., Atran) press the purity, harm and scope objections, and the Response answers them two ways because the authors disagree among themselves. |
| LIT-509 | Moral Molecules: Morality as a Combinatorial System | Curry, Alfano, Brandt & Pelican (2021), DOI-10.1007/s13164-021-00540-x. The seven morality-as-cooperation domains are treated as elements that combine into “molecules”. For each of the 21 pairs a moral concept is proposed and an example found in the literature: fraternity, blood revenge, filial piety, honour, queuing and so on. Counting combinations gives 127 positive molecules and 2,186 of mixed valence. The test is confirmatory: no search protocol, blind judges or failed searches are reported. | Proposed — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-399); a clear statement of the programme’s ambition, that seven cooperative elements generate “all moral ideas, possible and actual”, but its test is the weakest in the programme. For each of the 21 pairs the authors proposed a concept and then searched the literature until they found it (“We succeeded in every case”). No search protocol, judges or failed attempts are reported, and the theory “doesn’t predict which of these many possibilities will be actualities”. Two molecules (mendicance, common ownership) combine an element with the negation of another, which the paper’s own notation counts as mixed valence. It would be settled by blind judges classifying an independent list of moral concepts into the scheme, with a count of those that fit nothing. |
| LIT-510 | The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism | Trivers (1971), DOI-10.1086/406755. Altruism between non-relatives can be selected if acts cost the giver less than they benefit the recipient, the same partners meet repeatedly and symmetrically, and altruists stop helping those who fail to reciprocate. Cleaner-fish hosts fit; bird alarm calls are explained instead by self-interest. In humans, friendship, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, guilt, suspicion and their sham versions are proposed as adaptations that regulate exchange, and rules of conduct as a multiparty extension. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-402); worth reading as the source of reciprocal altruism and, for this record above all, of the first adaptive account of moral emotions: moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, guilt and the detection of sham versions of each, with “norms of reciprocal conduct” as a later step. The formal part is slight (a verbal model and Hamilton’s communicated Prisoner’s Dilemma sketch); the human psychology is hypothesis supported by the social-psychology literature of the 1960s. It grounds the exchange domain of morality-as-cooperation and gives that domain its emotions. |
| LIT-511 | The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment | Haidt (2001), DOI-10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814. Moral judgment is usually caused by fast affective intuitions; moral reasoning mostly comes after, to justify the judgment to others, and changes minds chiefly by triggering new intuitions in listeners. Four reasons are offered: two processing systems, motivated reasoning, post-hoc confabulation, and the weak link between moral reasoning and moral action. Intuitions are partly innate and are tuned by culture through custom complexes and peers in late childhood. Harmless taboo violations are condemned anyway, and people are “dumbfounded” when their reasons run out. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-403), from the author’s final manuscript; worth reading as the standard statement of the social intuitionist model, the proximate account of moral judgment that morality-as-cooperation lacks, and as the source of the “harmless wrongs” (consensual incest, sex with a dead chicken) on which the purity and sex objections to cooperative theories rest. Most of its evidence comes from outside the moral domain, which the author says himself: the model is offered as “a plausible alternative”, not an established fact. |
| LIT-512 | Moral universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 societies | Alfano, Cheong & Curry (2024), DOI-10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e25940. A word-count dictionary for the seven morality-as-cooperation domains (MAC-D, built by expert brainstorming and WordNet expansion) is run over 9,653 eHRAF Ethics paragraphs from 256 societies. Most morals are detected in most societies, with small but significant differences by region and subsistence. Against the earlier hand codes the dictionary agrees only slightly to fairly (κ .08–.25) and overstates prevalence. It cannot tell praise from condemnation, so it says nothing about valence. | Proposed — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-406); worth reading for the Morality-as-Cooperation Dictionary and for what it shows about the sixty-society result, not as a replication of it. The dictionary counts words and, by the authors’ own statement, “cannot be used to estimate the moral valence of cooperation”, so it does not test the 961-of-962 finding at all. Its agreement with the earlier hand codes is slight to fair (κ .08–.25), and it inflates fairness from 15% to 58% of societies. It detects significant, though small, regional differences, against the earlier claim of equal frequency. A spot-check of its paragraphs found admired theft in four more societies. It would be settled by valence-aware coding validated against blind hand codes, run with dictionaries for non-cooperative domains on the same corpus. |
| LIT-513 | Validation of Morality as Cooperation Questionnaire in Turkey, and Its Relation to Prosociality, Ideology, and Resource Scarcity | Yilmaz, Harma & Doğruyol (2021), DOI-10.1027/1015-5759/a000627. In Turkish undergraduates (n = 445), the MAC-Q’s seven-factor model fits the Relevance items (CFI .949, RMSEA .053) but not the Judgement items or the full form, as in the original. Deference and family track resistance to change, and fairness tracks lower opposition to equality. Resource-scarcity primes in Turkey (n = 576) and a preregistered US study (n = 921) change nothing. Relevance scores correlate modestly with prosocial intentions. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-397), from the accepted manuscript; worth reading as the first independent test of the MAC-Q, by a team with no morality-as-cooperation author. It reproduces the questionnaire’s main result in Turkish undergraduates (n = 445): seven factors fit the Relevance items (CFI .949) and fail on the Judgement items (CFI .828) and the full form (CFI .752). Its two resource-scarcity experiments are null. Its scope is narrow: there is no non-cooperative item, so it tests MAC’s structure, not its claim that morality is only cooperation; and the latent correlations (fairness–property .87, family–group .80) and a second-order single factor fitting at CFI .906 limit how distinct the seven are. |
| LIT-514 v3 | Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame | Boehm (2012), Basic Books. By the publisher’s account, the moral sense is “a sophisticated defense mechanism”: group punishment of bullies, thieves, free riders and psychopaths over six million years made social selection favour altruists and bred conscience, virtue and shame. The chapter list adds a “selection-by-reputation hypothesis” and its test. Unread: filed from the description and chapter list. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The book is lending-only at the Internet Archive (item moraloriginsevol0000boeh) and sold by Basic Books. What it argues is known here only from the publisher’s description, labelled as such. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-691 | Moral Responsibility | Talbert (2019; revised 2024), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A survey of moral responsibility: its relation to free will and determinism, forward-looking, Strawsonian and reasons-responsiveness accounts, the attributability/accountability distinction that grew from Wolf and Watson, the moral competence condition (Wolf’s JoJo), conversational views, standing to blame, outcomes, skepticism, moral luck, ultimate responsibility, manipulation and the epistemic condition. Its §2.3 is a page-referenced summary of Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-548); worth reading as the record’s map of moral responsibility apart from the free-will question, and as its most exact second-hand source for two accounts the record cannot read first-hand: Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control (§2.3, with page references to the 1998 book) and Wolf’s critique of Real Self views and her moral-competence condition, including the JoJo case (§§3.1.1, 3.2). It reports Wolf’s praise/blame asymmetry only in one sentence of its preamble. |
| LIT-701 v3 | Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings | Gilbert (2002), The Journal of Ethics 6(2):115–143. Unread. As read sources report it: it distinguishes personal, membership and collective guilt feelings, and defines collective guilt feelings by joint commitment, so that for us collectively to feel guilt over our action is for us to be jointly committed to feel guilt as a body. A plural subject can thus be in a collective emotion, and since emotions are separable from feelings, such emotions need no phenomenology of their own. Reprinted in Gilbert’s Joint Commitment (2013), ch. 11. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Springer and the OUP reprint are paywalled, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and the PhilArchive record (GILCGA) and SSRN abstract 1071254 both answered automated requests with a bot challenge or a block, which I did not try to get past. What the record says of it comes from Huebner’s read paper, which quotes it with page references, and is labelled second-hand. A person with PhilArchive or library access could supply the text; a reading would move this to Active and should test Huebner’s charge that a plural subject’s emotion reduces to individual commitments. Free copy: philarchive.org/rec/GILCGA (PhilArchive). |
| LIT-747 | Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise | Wolf (2015), Inquiry 58(2):127–142, the 2013 Routledge Lecture. The causal/moral contrast runs together two distinctions, shallow vs deep and moral vs nonmoral; we are deeply responsible for nonmoral traits and art too. Attributability and accountability are independent, not levels: accountability needs only wrongdoing, a position to know it, and its being up to the agent. The fit target of reactive attitudes is, tentatively, an “intelligent” self. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-565): in full, from the author’s typescript of the 2013 Routledge Lecture in Cambridge’s Apollo repository. Worth reading as the only lawful full text by Wolf on responsibility the record holds. It argues that deep responsibility is not limited to the moral, and that attributability and accountability are independent, not two levels. Accountability may need nothing metaphysically robust. What makes a self a fit target of the reactive attitudes is, on her “hunch”, that it is an “intelligent” self. Limits: the positive view is offered as a hunch, the psychopath is a stipulated case, and the lecture does not restate the Reason View of Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685). |
| LIT-1210 v2 | Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism | Wong (2006). There is no single true morality, but there can be several true moralities, each answering the same problem of how to live well together under a common core of human values; pluralistic relativism sits between universalism and “anything goes”. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed, with the Oxford Academic DOI as its only location; the publisher offers it only to subscribers, and web searches found only catalogue, review and paid e-book listings, and no author or repository copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1370 v3 | Pluralistic ignorance and alcohol use on campus: Some consequences of misperceiving the social norm | Prentice and Miller (1993). Princeton students believed their peers were more comfortable with campus drinking practices than they were themselves; over time men’s private attitudes shifted toward the misperceived norm, while women’s alienation from it grew. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text; the APA PsycNET copy is paywalled; the authors’ institutional pages (Princeton’s research portal, two records; Stanford GSB’s publication page for Dale Miller) list it without a file; PubPeer has a record only. A web search found no author’s copy. The summary is the abstract’s and the paper’s standard reading, unchecked. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1402 v2 | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Franklin (written 1771–1790; first published 1791). The memoir of his life to 1757. Part Three holds the anecdote the Benjamin Franklin effect is named for: to win over a hostile new member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin asked to borrow a scarce book from his library, returned it with thanks, and the man thereafter spoke to him with civility and “manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions”. Franklin gives it as “another instance of the truth of an old maxim”, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged”, and as a lesson in prudence. Around it the memoir is a record of how he got others to act with him: undogmatic speech, projects presented as his friends’, and opinion prepared in print and through the Junto’s satellite clubs. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1360) in full, from Project Gutenberg eBook #148 (Harvard Classics, 1909); worth reading as the source of the Benjamin Franklin effect and, around it, a first-hand manual of influence: modest speech, projects put forward as “a scheme of a number of friends”, opinion prepared in print and spread through the Junto’s clubs “as arising in each of them”. Read it knowing that it is a memoir written decades after the events, for posterity and in part from memory without papers; that the borrowed-book story is one instance of an “old maxim”, given as prudence, with the member unnamed and the effect reported by the man who sought it; and that the edition’s chronology list has errors the memoir itself contradicts. |
| LIT-1408 v4 | Intergroup Contact Theory | Pettigrew (1998). Reviews Allport’s contact hypothesis (equal status, common goals, cooperation, authority support) and names four problems: selection bias in cross-sectional studies, an expanding list of conditions that are facilitating rather than essential, no account of process, and no account of how effects generalize. Proposes four processes (learning about the outgroup, changed behaviour as the precursor of attitude change, affective ties, and ingroup reappraisal, whose outcome it calls “deprovincialization”), three sequential strategies for generalization (decategorization, salient categorization, recategorization), and a longitudinal contact theory in which Allport’s four conditions and a fifth, friendship potential, are essential and other factors facilitating. In the author’s European surveys the path from outgroup friendship to less prejudice is stronger than the reverse. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1408) in full, from an Annual Reviews PDF of the chapter on Serendip Studio, Bryn Mawr College’s science-education site (https://serendipstudio.org/oneworld/system/files/annurev.psych_.49.1.65-2.pdf); worth reading as the review that turned Allport’s contact hypothesis into a theory with four processes (learning, changed behavior, affective ties, ingroup reappraisal), a staged account of generalization and a fifth condition, friendship potential. Read it knowing that its processes are proposed rather than tested, that its causal evidence is mostly the author’s cross-sectional European surveys, that “deprovincialization” occurs once and rests on one unpublished analysis of national pride, and that its model still treats Allport’s four conditions as essential, which the 2006 meta-analysis (LIT-1413) does not bear out. |
| LIT-1413 v3 | A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory | Pettigrew & Tropp (2006). A meta-analysis of 515 studies (713 independent samples, 250,089 participants, 38 countries, through 2000) finds that intergroup contact typically reduces intergroup prejudice (random-effects r ≈ −.21; 94% of samples negative). Samples without choice of contact show larger effects, and the more rigorous studies larger ones (experiments −.34), though for racial and ethnic targets experiments show no advantage. Five of six publication-bias checks find none; Vevea and Hedges’s model, adjusted, leaves no significant overall effect but a significant one for well-controlled designs. Effects generalize to the whole outgroup and, in few tests, beyond. Allport’s optimal conditions enhance the effect (structured programs −.29 against −.20) but work as a bundle and are not essential to it. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1407) in full, from the published article’s PDF on a University of Pennsylvania Wharton site (https://ideas.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Pettigrew-Tropp.pdf); worth reading as the meta-analysis of 515 studies (713 samples) that established a reliable negative association between face-to-face intergroup contact and prejudice (r ≈ −.21, −.34 in experiments) and showed Allport’s conditions to enhance it without being needed. Read it knowing that most of its samples are cross-sectional surveys of reported contact, that one of its six publication-bias checks (Vevea and Hedges) leaves no significant overall effect, and that the larger effects of rigorous designs come from non-racial targets: for racial and ethnic samples experiments give −.22, the overall mean. |
| LIT-1419 v2 | Liking a Person as a Function of Doing Him a Favour | Jecker & Landy (1969). The first experimental test of the Benjamin Franklin effect. Participants won money in a concept-formation task; afterwards one group was asked by the experimenter to return it as a personal favour (he was paying out of his own pocket), one was asked by a departmental secretary on behalf of the psychology department, and one was not asked. Those who did the experimenter a personal favour rated him most likable. Standardly read as a dissonance effect: one justifies a favour by liking its recipient. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy; the SAGE page is paywalled; a web search found only secondary accounts and abstract listings (Scilit). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, and its summary remains secondary. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1427 | Psychopathy: A Clinical Construct Whose Time Has Come | Hare (1996), Criminal Justice and Behavior 23(1):25–54. The programmatic statement that psychopathy, once reliably measured by the PCL-R, is a clinical construct of real use to the criminal justice system, including for predicting recidivism and violence. Unread: the author’s ResearchGate copy refused this client. The construct is read in Hare & Neumann (2008). | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: a lawful copy exists but this client could not fetch it, so this failed on access, not availability. A full-text PDF is linked from the author’s ResearchGate profile (publication 280798957, under profile/Robert-Hare-2), apparently his own upload, but ResearchGate answered every request with HTTP 403, so neither the file nor its uploader could be confirmed. Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy, the journal (SAGE) is closed, and the author’s own site, hare.org, lists the paper with a DOI link and no PDF. The construct it presents is read first-hand in Hare and Neumann’s 2008 review (LIT-1428), which gives the PCL-R items, their four factors and their two-factor grouping. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or ResearchGate can be reached, not on merit. |
| LIT-1428 | Psychopathy as a Clinical and Empirical Construct | Hare & Neumann (2008), Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 4:217–246. The PCL-R’s items form four correlated factors, Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle and Antisocial, explained by one superordinate factor; psychopathy is dimensional, and no component, affective or antisocial, is more essential than the others. Cleckley’s Clinical Profile, drawn from an unrepresentative sample, should not be the test of the construct. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1094): in full, from the copy Hare posts on his own site. Worth reading as the authors’ own statement of what the construct is, made while defending it against the charge that the PCL-R has “drifted” from Cleckley. The PCL-R’s 20 items fall, 18 of them, into four correlated factors: Interpersonal and Affective (together Factor 1) and Lifestyle and Antisocial (together Factor 2). A single superordinate factor explains them, and the authors hold that no component, the affective one included, is more essential than the others. That is the sharpest constraint the record has on borrowing only the affective features of psychopathy for a corporation. Hare receives royalties from the PCL-R. |
| LIT-1683 | Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior | Sober & Wilson (1998). Part I defends multilevel (group) selection as a cause of evolutionary altruism; Part II argues that the case for psychological egoism fails and that natural selection likely produced genuinely other-directed ultimate desires, distinguishing evolutionary from psychological altruism. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. The Internet Archive’s copy (untoothersevolut00sobe) is for print-disabled readers only and is not lent, and no open edition was found. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Stich 2006 (LIT-1737). |
| LIT-1713 | Responsibility to Future Generations: A Moral Reframing Strategy for Combatting Climate Change | Syropoulos, Kraft-Todd, Mah, Markowitz & Young (2023). Thirteen studies (six main, seven supplementary; N = 161,633) on felt responsibility to future generations (RFG). In Eurobarometer data from 34 European countries (N = 109,513), a majority in 33 agreed “We need to reform to benefit future generations even if that means making some sacrifices now”; agreement barely related to ideology, age or gender (meta-r .03 to .07) and weakly to subjective status (.13). In US samples RFG was endorsed more than responsibility to reduce one’s own contribution to climate change (RCC), correlated with conservatism half as strongly (meta-r −.21 against −.45), and predicted self-reported proenvironmental behaviour, concern and policy support. In a preregistered experiment (N = 3,175), five brief interventions (a letter to a person born today, legacy reflection, reflection on past generations’ sacrifices, a park video, a 385-word excerpt of What We Owe the Future) each raised RFG and proenvironmental intentions by small amounts (d = .14 to .54); only the letter raised donations. Reflection on past sacrifices raised RFG but not RCC. All outcomes are self-reports or a small donation. status_note: worth reading as the largest study of felt responsibility to future generations, its spread and its political neutrality, and as the record’s only experiment comparing legacy, reciprocity, a particular future person and an impersonal longtermist text as routes to it; read in place of Syropoulos and Markowitz 2021. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1293), in place of LIT-1741, which could not be reached; worth reading as the largest study of felt responsibility to future generations, its spread and its political neutrality, and as the record’s only experiment comparing legacy, reciprocity, a particular future person and an impersonal longtermist text as routes to it; read in place of Syropoulos and Markowitz 2021. |
| LIT-1717 | Leaving a Legacy: Intergenerational Allocations of Benefits and Burdens | Six experiments (N = 76, 101, 64, 32, 131, 92; U.S. undergraduates, MBA students and university staff) on how the valence of what is passed on affects concern for one’s legacy and generosity to future others. Framing climate change as leaving burdens, rather than using up benefits, raised a generativity scale built from items about being remembered and living on (4.90 vs 4.10), direct concern with one’s legacy, felt responsibility and affinity toward future generations, and ethical concern; recalling one’s own past burden allocation raised moral emotions. In allocation tasks people favoured themselves more with benefits than with burdens. The difference appeared only when the recipient was in the future (not in a dictator-game version with a present recipient), and only when the allocator was a party to the trade-off (not when allocating between two other people). One item on ethical considerations statistically accounted for the first of these. The authors read the pattern as legacy concern, which they define as the wish to extend the self beyond death, engaged more by leaving burdens than by withholding benefits. Legacy concern was measured only in the attitude studies, never in the allocation studies. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1273), in place of LIT-1716, which could not be reached; worth reading as the legacy programme’s fullest experimental statement before the 2012 mortality studies, and as the record’s only second-hand source for Wade-Benzoni 2006 (LIT-1716). Read it knowing that legacy concern and generosity are never measured in the same study, and that the generosity effects sit in one cell: people keep more benefits for themselves when the other person will receive them later. |
| LIT-1729 | Empirical Approaches to Altruism | The SEP survey of the empirical egoism–altruism debate, revised in 2025. On the standard account, altruism needs an ultimate desire for another’s well-being; biological and social-science senses of “altruism” settle nothing about it. Batson’s experiments make a strong case against the aversive-arousal and social-punishment versions of egoism. Self-other merging is a different challenge: only numerical identity with the helped person would make helping egoistic, and none of the four measures used by Cialdini et al. and Batson et al. (IOS, “we”, perceived similarity, trait-rating difference) tests for it. The authors report that Batson et al. (1997) avoided Cialdini’s methodological problems and found empathy’s role “clearly evident”, and that a preregistered study (N = 680) supports the empathy–helping link. Altruism is still not shown: divine punishment, principlism, non-moral norms, and habitual or Pavlovian helping remain to be ruled out. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1274), in place of LIT-1700 and LIT-1728, which could not be reached; worth reading as the shortest neutral account of the 1997 merging exchange the record holds: it quotes both papers’ measures, and it argues that a merging criterion must be one of numerical identity to matter for egoism. It does not report the 1997 results in numbers. |
| LIT-1743 | Preregistered Replication and Extension of “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue” | Robertson, Akles & Van Bavel (2024). Two preregistered experiments (minimal groups n = 590; partisans n = 577) did not replicate intergroup moral hypocrisy; the minimal-group contrast is statistically equivalent to zero. In minimal groups, in-group favouritism in fairness judgments rose with collective identification and was not significant overall (p = .07); partisans judged out-party members’ identical selfish acts less fair (p = .003). | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1245) from the authors’ accepted manuscript on OSF; worth reading as the record’s only preregistered evidence on minimal-group favouritism. Valdesolo and DeSteno’s intergroup moral hypocrisy did not replicate; minimal-group favouritism appeared only as it rose with identification, and partisans derogated the out-party. |
| LIT-1748 | The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction | Schubert, Caviola & Faber (2019). Five studies (N = 2,507 as stated) of Parfit’s three outcomes: no catastrophe, 80% of humanity killed, 100% killed. Most laypeople judge extinction bad and say it must be prevented, but only 19–37% of those ranking the outcomes in the expected order judge the step from 80% to 100% worse than the step from none to 80%. More do when the victims are zebras, when the catastrophe sterilizes rather than kills, or when told to consider the long-term future (39–50%). A majority (67–77%) do only when told the surviving future would be long and utopian. People recruited as existential-risk mitigators do so unprompted (86%). The authors conclude that laypeople attend to immediate harm to fellow humans and neglect the long-term consequences. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1270) from the publisher’s PDF (CC BY), without the supplementary materials; worth reading as the first experiment on how far lay moral concern reaches past the living, and what makes it reach further: salience of the future, its quality, and less sympathy with the victims. |
| LIT-1749 | Population ethical intuitions | Caviola, Althaus, Mogensen & Goodwin (preprint 2021; Cognition 2022). Nine experiments (N = 5,776 as stated) on lay population axiology. For a fixed population to be better existing than not, people require more happiness than suffering: about 75% happy people, still about 61% when the two are stated to be exactly equally intense. Yet adding one extremely happy person to a world is judged as good as adding one extremely unhappy person is bad, so people reject neutrality and the procreation asymmetry. They prefer larger happy and smaller unhappy populations when averages are fixed, but the preference for more happy people fades and reverses at a billion. With totals fixed they prefer higher averages, and in conflicts averagism tends to win, even favouring adding near-maximally unhappy people who raise the average. Prompts to reflect move judgements toward totalism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1267) from the authors’ PsyArXiv preprint (osf.io/wdbr8, OSF file of 2021-04-01); worth reading as the main experimental evidence on whether ordinary judgement is person-affecting or impersonal about merely possible people, and on how weak its totalism is at large numbers. |
| LIT-1766 | Recategorization and Prosocial Behavior: Common In-Group Identity and a Dual Identity | A review of the common in-group identity model applied to helping. Recategorizing two groups as one removes in-group bias in helping: in a laboratory study, help to an original out-group member rose to the in-group level; at a football stadium, White fans complied with a Black interviewer’s request more often when he wore their university’s hat (59% vs 36%). Commons-dilemma studies show the same for cooperation. But the form of the shared identity matters. White students helped a Black student least when he called himself a Black person or a Black Colgate student (a dual identity), and most when he called himself a Colgate student. In the second study, empathic concern partly mediated that effect on helping; attitudes did not. The authors trace the dual identity’s cost to majority members projecting their group’s standards onto the superordinate category, and to identity threat. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1286), in place of LIT-1710 and LIT-1709, which could not be reached; worth reading as the model’s authors’ own account of how an enlarged “we” extends helping across group lines, with the qualification that the “we” which helps is the helper’s version of it. |
| LIT-1786 | Group-level self-definition and self-investment: A hierarchical (multicomponent) model of in-group identification | In-group identification has five components on two correlated dimensions. Group-level self-definition is individual self-stereotyping (seeing oneself as like the average member) and in-group homogeneity; group-level self-investment is solidarity, satisfaction and centrality. In confirmatory factor analyses of Dutch, European and university identification in two cohorts (N = 464, 363), this model fit better than one-factor, two-factor and cognitive-versus-affective alternatives; the two dimensions correlated .61 to .77. Prospectively, the components predicted different things: centrality predicted perceived threat, homogeneity perceived intergroup difference, and, facing evidence of their group’s misdeeds, self-stereotyping predicted group-based guilt while satisfaction and centrality predicted legitimizing the misdeeds. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1262), in place of LIT-1795, which could not be reached; worth reading as the direct test of whether identification splits into a self-definition and a caring dimension: it does, and they can work against each other. |
| LIT-1857 | Exposing Pluralistic Ignorance to Reduce Alcohol Use Among College Students | Schroeder & Prentice (1998). Princeton first-year students took part in either a peer-oriented discussion that exposed pluralistic ignorance about drinking or an individual-oriented discussion of responsible decisions. Four to six months later the peer-oriented group reported fewer drinks a week (3.10 against 5.05; p = .05). Their estimates of the average student’s comfort with drinking did not differ by condition. What differed was that, in the control condition, students high in fear of negative evaluation drank above average whatever they thought of peers. The authors infer that exposure weakened the norm’s prescriptive force without changing what it prescribed. Men closed the gap between their own and the average student’s comfort, but by revising their estimate of others, not their own attitude, the reverse of Prentice and Miller’s 1993 finding. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1439) from the published article as downloaded from Wiley and posted on Stanford SPARQ’s site (https://sparq.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj19021/files/media/file/schroeder_prentice_1998_-_exposing_pluralistic_ignorance.pdf); worth reading as the field test of exposing pluralistic ignorance, and as the nearest read source for Prentice and Miller 1993 (LIT-1370), which it restates and in part fails to replicate. Read it knowing that drinking is self-reported, that the comparison is between two discussion formats with no untreated control, that 143 of 452 students were followed up, and that the main effect is p = .05. |
| LIT-2002 v2 | Human cooperation is strong among individuals but fragile between groups | Van Lange & Bergmann (2026), doi:10.1038/s44159-026-00580-z. A Perspective. Cooperation is strong in dyads and fragile between groups. Categorization alone yields mistrust and in-group favouritism by bounded reciprocity. Only conflicting interests, real or perceived, turn that into costly competition and hate, and the processes that build in-group cooperation can fuel intergroup conflict. Source of THEORY-1352, read in NOTE-1537. | Active |
| LIT-2004 v2 | The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation | Henrich & Muthukrishna (2021), doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-081920-042106. Registered unread from the owner’s synthesis of 2026-11-04, whose §4 cites it for the claim that genetic evolution alone cannot explain the scale and cultural variability of human cooperation, so cultural evolution, norms, institutions and culture–gene coevolution matter too. That is unverified until read. The record holds the genetic mechanisms (THEORY-567, THEORY-655, THEORY-663) and the moral psychology (THEORY-468, THEORY-539), not the cultural-evolutionary account. | Unfetched — looked for 2026-11-04, not reached. A lawful free copy exists on the authors’ lab site: https://coevolution.fas.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/culture_cognition_coevol_lab/files/annurev-psych-081920-042106.pdf. From this client it returns HTTP 403 with an “Access Denied” page, so it was not fetched and no attempt was made to get past it. LSE Research Online’s record (eprints.lse.ac.uk/107611) holds no file. OpenAlex and Europe PMC (no email address sent, ADR-008) list no open copy, and the publisher’s PDF is paywalled. A copy the owner supplies returns it to reading. |