Oliver Scott Curry Profile picture
Research Director @kindness_org | Affiliate @oxford_anthro | Associate @LSEPhilosophy Evolution, cooperation, morality & politics. All tweets are hypotheses.
Feb 20, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
Tit-for-Tat (TFT) is not the (only) answer to prisoners dilemmas. Change the rules of Axelrod's tournaments slightly, and other more punitive (T&C) and more sophisticated (S&R) strategies emerge as winners doi.org/10.1371/journa… Add noise, and more generous (GTFT, NICE) and more exploitative (PAVLOV) strategies can win doi.org/10.1038/364056… journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
Jul 18, 2022 16 tweets 5 min read
🚨Moral Universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 cultures🚨Delighted to share this new work, with @MoralPsych & Marc Cheong #dic #LIWC #HRAF #moralityascooperation #ethicalatlas osf.io/86qry 🧵 2. What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values (love, loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness, property) posited by the theory of Morality-as-Cooperation’ (MAC)? 2/ Image
May 7, 2020 33 tweets 8 min read
1. Group Selection: A guide for the confused OR: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Multilevel Selection.

People have been arguing about group selection for decades. What’s going on? Is it something you need to know about? <thread> 2. tl;dr No. There’s nothing to see here. New-fangled ‘group-’ or ‘multilevel-selection’ is just a complicated way of saying ‘selection for cooperation’. Go and do something more interesting instead.
Feb 27, 2019 5 tweets 2 min read
The philosopher @mpigliucci critiques morality-as-cooperation (MAC) and the 60 culture study here, but I think he misconstrues the central argument. (I hope we can discuss and resolve this interesting issue.) #moralityascooperation We don't 'confuse descriptive and prescriptive’. MAC is primarily a (meta-ethical, descriptive) theory about the nature of morality (that it is a system of cooperative rules). From this theory we derive predictions about the content of morality (ie what the prescriptions will be)
Dec 20, 2018 37 tweets 8 min read
1/ What's wrong with Moral Foundations Theory? (And how to get moral psychology right) <a long thread> 2/ Once the exclusive preserve of theology and philosophy, the study of morality is now a thriving interdisciplinary mix of evolutionary theory, genetics, biology, animal behaviour, psychology and anthropology.
Mar 13, 2018 23 tweets 5 min read
1/ Do you need God to be good? Some thoughts on morality and religion, prompted by debates like this: @RFupdates 2/ There are lots of interesting questions about morality, like (i) what are the origins of morality, (ii) what explains its content, (iii) what motivates people to be moral, (iv) are there objective moral standards?