Abstract
A complex web of social and moral norms governs many everyday human behaviors, acting as the glue for social harmony. The existence of moral norms helps elucidate the psychological motivations underlying a wide variety of seemingly puzzling behavior, including why humans help or trust total strangers. In this review, we examine four widespread moral norms: Fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation, and consider how a single social instrument-reciprocity-underpins compliance to these norms. Using a game theoretic framework, we examine how both context and emotions moderate moral standards, and by extension, moral behavior. We additionally discuss how a mechanism of reciprocity facilitates the adherence to, and enforcement of, these moral norms through a core network of brain regions involved in processing reward. In contrast, violating this set of moral norms elicits neural activation in regions involved in resolving decision conflict and exerting cognitive control. Finally, we review how a reinforcement mechanism likely governs learning about morally normative behavior. Together, this review aims to explain how moral norms are deployed in ways that facilitate flexible moral choices.
Highlights
A complex web of social and moral norms governs many everyday human behaviors, acting as the glue for social harmony
Using a game theoretic perspective, we illustrate how these norms act as a driving force behind flexible moral behavior (Melnikoff & Bailey, 2018), whereby different classes of behavioral patterns can arise depending on which norm is activated (Ajzen, 1991)
While we posit that moral decision-making is largely motivated by four fundamental norms, other prominent theories have argued that a number of additional norms are critical for successful socialization (Moral Foundations Theory; Haidt, 2007), or that all moral behaviors can be reduced to a single motivation—the desire to reduce harm (Theory of Dyadic Morality; Schein & Gray, 2017)
Summary
Social norms are ubiquitous and endemic to social life They provide a standard for behavior based on mutual and widely shared psychological attitudes, expectations, and beliefs about how members of society ought to behave (House, 2018). These norms help to promote harmonious living, in which the concerns of others are taken into account (Ullmann-Margalit, 1978). They prescribe mores (e.g., wear black to a funeral) and sometimes. If increasing one’s wealth leads an individual to deviate from morally normative patterns, negative consequences for others may ensue (harm is applied, money stolen, and so forth). We argue that these norms of fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation are all subserved by, and rooted in, a single mechanism—reciprocity— that enables people to make flexible moral decisions across a range of social contexts
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