🚨 I’m pleased to announce: The Extended Morality as Cooperation Dictionary (eMACD) – a new and improved way to detect moral themes in text, for use in moral psychology + natural language processing (NLP) @MediaNeuro🧵 We trained 1,000+ U.S. participants to highlight MAC’s seven moral themes (family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights) in 5,500+ news articles, and used their codings to create a lexicon of 2,500+ moral words.

As far as I'm aware, Peter Singer has never given a positive argument for why other people’s interests are as important as your own, and hence why you ought to be utilitarian. A 2005 paper concedes that it is an intuition & that he has yet to give a rational argument for it… I don't think he ever will give such an argument, because there is no such argument to be had. It’s a mirage, a perpetual motion machine, etc…

🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 Never mind moral universals in 60 cultures, how about moral universals in 256 cultures?! 🧵 #moralityascooperation @HRAF755 doi.org/10.1016/j.heli…
Previous research found evidence for the universality of MAC's seven moral rules across 60 cultures. But what about the other ~200 cultures in @HRAF755? doi.org/10.1086/701478

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…

🚨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/

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.

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

https://twitter.com/mpigliucci/status/998892942814253057

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)

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.

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?