Gordon Ingram

When individuals learn from what others tell them, the information is subject to transmission error that does not arise in learning from direct experience. Yet evidence shows that humans consistently prefer this apparently more unreliable source of information. We examine the effect this preference has in cases where the information concerns a judgment on others’ behaviour and is used to establish cooperation in a society. We present a spatial model confirming that cooperation can be sustained by gossip containing a high degree of uncertainty. Accuracy alone does not predict the value of information in evolutionary terms; relevance, the impact of information on behavioural outcomes, must also be considered. We then show that once relevance is incorporated as a criterion, second-hand information can no longer be discounted on the basis of its poor fidelity alone. Finally we show that the relative importance of accuracy and relevance depends on factors of life history and demography.

A central tenet of evolutionary ethics is that as a result of evolutionary processes, humans tend to respond in certain ways to particular moral problems. Various authors have posited “dual-process” conflicts between “fast”, automatic, evolved impulses, and “slower”, controlled, reasoned judgements. In this chapter we argue that the evolutionary sources of automatic moral judgements are diverse, and include some intuitive processes that are quite sophisticated in term of social cognition. In our view, controlled, reflective moral reasoning represents the activity of higher-level processes that arbitrate between conflicting inputs from diverse automatic heuristics, in response to normative concerns. The integration and subjugation of automatic responses to more reflective ones is a developmental process that takes place at varying rates in different people and in diverse cultural contexts. We consider how approaches that represent cognition in terms of dual processes can be rendered more sophisticated by a consideration of evolutionary developmental psychology. We then apply this more developmentally aware approach to an extended example of the phenomenon in children’s moral development known as the outcome-to-intent shift. We outline a model of how automatic and controlled processes may be integrated in children’s social learning in culturally variable ways.