The DOI matches its Crossref record.
A Natural History of Human Morality
Abstract
Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on experimental data comparing great apes and human children, he reconstructs two key evolutionary steps whereby early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species capable of acting as a plural agent “we”.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“This general idea has been elaborated particularly clearly by Tomasello (2016), who presented an explanation for the evolution of morality that included a proposal for the reduction of aggressiveness in H. sapiens. Tomasello called it the “interdependence hypothesis.””
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Tomasello, 2016
In the citing paper
“Selection favored a low propensity for male aggression because offspring were thereby better protected from the father’s potential violence.”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Tomasello, 2016
In the citing paper
“The result was a new kind of interdependence, such that individuals who were collaborative and less selfish were favored: cooperators fed better, for instance, than those who were not chosen as foraging partners.”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Tomasello, 2016
In the citing paper
“First, due to this ecological change, mid-Pleistocene Homo were forced to collaborate in the food quest, rather than foraging individually as they had until then.”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Tomasello, 2016
In the citing paper
“Effective cooperation depended on a reduction in selfishness and aggressiveness, and on a concomitant increase in sympathy and shared intentionality.”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Tomasello, 2016
In the citing paper
“According to the interdependence hypothesis the initial influence on the road to a human style of morality occurred around 400,000 years ago when there was a “disappearance of individually obtainable foods” (Tomasello, 2016: 136).”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Tomasello, 2016
In the citing paper
“The ability to conduct planned executions means that the killers must share explicit intentions with each other, a capacity that is unique to humans (Tomasello, 2016).”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Tomasello, 2016
Citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies
Curry, O. S., Mullins, D., & Whitehouse, H. (2019) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/701478 · Cited by 782
“It is no accident that ideals of the good human life often emphasize relationship with others: an evolutionary adaptation enabling human beings to cooperate may be the disposition to fi nd relationship with others satisfying for their own sake (Moll et al. 2006; Tomasello 2016).”
Why people prefer unequal societies
Starmans, C., Sheskin, M., & Bloom, P. (2017) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0082 · Cited by 556
Two types of aggression in human evolution.
Wrangham, R. W. (2018) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1713611115 · Cited by 410
Kinship, Cooperation, and the Evolution of Moral Systems*
Enke, B. (2019) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjz001 · Cited by 365
How children come to understand false beliefs: A shared intentionality account
Tomasello, M. (2018) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1804761115 · Cited by 320
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Tomasello, M.
- Affiliations
- Max Planck Society (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Tomasello, Michael
- ORCID
- Tomasello, Michael
- Venue
- Harvard University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Harvard University Press
- Published
- 2016-12-31
- OpenAlex
- W791834320
- Cited by
- 924
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 71 · 2025: 78 · 2024: 95 · 2023: 94 · 2022: 117 · 2021: 151 · 2020: 88 · 2019: 89 · 2018: 65 · 2017: 63 · 2016: 11
- FWCI
- 39.50
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Harvard University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Max Planck Digital Library (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- human morality, moral psychology, evolution of morality, great apes, children, cooperation, social cognition, comparative psychology
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
