Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0956797610376073

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion.

Our theoretical understanding individual differences can be used as a tool to test and refine theory. Individual differences are useful because judgments, including philosophically relevant intuitions, are the predictable products of the fit between adaptive psychological mechanisms (e.g., heuristics, traits, skills, capacities) and task constraints. As an illustration of this method and its potential implications, our target article used a canonical, representative, and affectively charged judgment task to reveal a relationship between the heritable personality trait extraversion and compatabilist judgments. In the current comment we further clarify major theoretical implications of these data and outline potential opportunities and obstacles for this methodology. Discussion focuses on (1) the need for theoretically grounded a priori predictions; (2) the use of precise process level data and theory; (3) the possibility of convergent validity as personality is known to predict life experiences and outcomes; and (4) the fundamentally adaptive nature of cognition. Adaptive Judgment and Philosophical Intuition 3 Adaptive Variation in Judgment and Philosophical Intuition How can we develop a broad theoretical understanding of the dynamics of folk judgment

Abstract: Sport fandom has received considerable attention from social scientists, yet few have considered it from an evolutionary perspective. To redress this gap, we develop the hypothesis that team sports exhibit characteristics that activate mechanisms which evolved to facilitate the development of coalitions in the context of small-scale warfare. Based on this by-product hypothesis, we predicted a correlation between fandom and binding (i.e. group-relevant) concerns, especially loyalty. To test this prediction, we administered the Sport Spectator Identification Scale (SSI) and the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) to 495 undergraduates. The MFQ measures three binding concerns, including loyalty, and two individualizing ones, harm and fairness. As predicted, fandom correlated significantly with loyalty (r =.27) and, within men, the two other binding concerns, authority (r =.22) and purity (r =.24). By contrast, fandom did not significantly correlate with harm or fairness. In addition, we predicted and found that men reported significantly higher levels of fandom (Cohen’s d =.45) and loyalty (d =.27) than did women. In conclusion, this study presents data supporting the coalitional by-product hypothesis of fandom and should spur further research using fandom as a window into our evolved psychology.

In the field of moral psychology, a number of theoretical proposals that were at one time regarded as unconnected at best—and, at worst, contradictory—are showing signs of reconciliation. At the core of this emerging consensus is a recognition that moral judgment is the product of interaction and competition between distinct psychological

The focus for the Centre is research into individual and strategic decision-making using a combination of theoretical and experimental methods. On the theory side, members of the Centre investigate individual choice under uncertainty, cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, as well as theories of psychology, bounded rationality and evolutionary game theory. Members of the Centre have applied experimental methods in the fields of public economics, individual choice under risk and uncertainty, strategic interaction, and the performance of auctions, markets and other economic institutions. Much of the Centre's research involves collaborative projects with researchers from other departments in the UK and overseas.

The scaffolded mind: Higher mental processes are grounded in early

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The moral principles found in philosophy and embodied in law are often strikingly complex, peculiar, and yet resolutely persistent. For instance, it was long held in Britain that a person could be tried for murder only if the victim died within a year and a day of the crime. And in the United States, if a robber gets into a shootout with a cop and the cop’s bullet hits a bystander, the robber can be charged with murdering the bystander. Naively, one might have assumed that murder could be defined simply as “intentionally causing another person to die.” In fact, the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code requires pages of fine print. Our goal in this chapter is to present a model of the origins of moral principles that explain these

Michael Shermer, one of the world’s most renowned skeptical authorities and the founder and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, has built his career around debunking irrational and poorly supported beliefs. Despite his notability as a proponent of skepticism and scientific reasoning, Shermer may not be as well known for his vast knowledge of