Abstract

Over many thousands of years, humans developed mechanisms to help us live together in ever-larger social groups. We developed moral emotions, such as empathy, guilt and outrage, as well as a bias in favour of people in our in-groups, and a propensity to punish perceived wrongdoers. Our culture also evolved, giving us tools like religion and politics that expanded community sizes and maintained moral order. While these mechanisms served our ancestors well, our evolved moral psychology is often out of step with the modern world. How We Became Human apples an evolutionary mismatch framework to look at how some evolved behavioural traits that were effective at promoting prosocial behaviour in ancestral environments can cause social problems in modern large-scale societies.