Human Morality: Love or Fear, Partnership or Domination

David Loye pointed us to one of Charles Darwin’s aims that often has been overlooked, to explain the evolution of humanity’s moral sense. Most people focus on Darwin’s aim to explain speciation, changes in traits across generations. In studying the moral sense, Darwin assumed it was innate, though he found it more evident among non-Western peoples he met than among his British compatriots. His finding is not a surprise if you understand when and how most human sociomoral capacities are shaped—after birth, by immersive experience. Humanity’s evolved developmental niche, or evolved nest, appears to be crucial for the development of moral sense because it provides the support needed to optimize the development of psychosocial neurobiological systems. To reestablish and maintain the moral sense, humanity needs to restore the provision of the evolved nest to all people, especially children

The Evolved Nest: A Partnership System that Fosters Child and Societal Wellbeing

Although most people want children to thrive, many adults in industrialized nations have forgotten what that means and how to foster thriving. We review the nature and effects of the evolved developmental system for human offspring, a partnership system that fosters every kind of wellbeing. The environment and the type of care received, particularly in early life, shape neurobiological process that give rise to social and moral capacities. A deep view of history sheds light on converging evidence from the fields of neuroscience, developmental psychology, epigenetics, and ethnographic research that depicts how sociomoral capacities are not hardwired but are biosocially constructed. The Evolved Nest is the ecological system of care that potentiates both physical and psychological thriving, the foundations of cooperative and egalitarian societies. Deprivation of the evolved nest thwarts human development, resulting in sub-optimal, species-atypical outcomes of illbeing, high stress reactivity, dysregulation, and limited sociomoral capabilities. Utilizing a wider lens that incorporates humanity’s deep ancestral history, it becomes clear that deprivation of the evolved nest cuts against the development of human nature and humanity’s cultural heritage. Returning to providing the evolved nest to families and communities holds the potential to revise contemporary understandings of wellbeing and human nature. It can expand current metrics of wellness, beyond resilience to optimization

Getting Back on Track to Being Human

Cooperation and compassion are forms of intelligence. Their lack is an indication of ongoing stress or toxic stress during development that undermined the usual growth of compassion capacities. Though it is hard to face at first awareness, humans in the dominant culture tend to be pretty unintelligent compared to those from societies that existed sustainably for thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of years. Whereas in sustainable societies everyone must learn to cooperate with earth’s systems to survive and thrive, in the dominant culture this is no longer the case. Now due to technological advances that do not take into account the long-term welfare of earth systems, humans have become “free riders” until these systems collapse from abuse or misuse. The dominant human culture, a “weed species,” has come to devastate planetary ecosystems in a matter of centuries. What do we do to return ourselves to living as earth creatures, as one species among many in community? Humanity needs to restore lost capacities—relational attunement and communal imagination—whose loss occurs primarily in cultures dominated by child-raising practices and ways of thinking that undermine cooperative companionship and a sense of partnership that otherwise develops from the beginning of life. To plant the seeds of cooperation, democracy, and partnership, we need to provide the evolved nest to children, and facilitate the development of ecological attachment to their landscape. This will take efforts at the individual, policy, and institutional levels.YesSubmissions undergo a double-blinded peer review process, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. The results of the review will be returned to the author with one of four responses: unconditional acceptance, acceptance pending minor revisions, acceptance pending major revisions, or not accepted

Beyond resilience to thriving: Optimizing child wellbeing

Research in child wellbeing often assesses the effects of particular disadvantages or focuses on children’s resilience in adverse circumstances. In contrast, considering developmental optimization in early childhood, and what is necessary to foster it, informs the study of child wellbeing in the socioemotional domain. In the program of research reviewed here, we consider the kinds of early experiences that promote wellbeing, defined as optimal physiological and emotional regulation that enables a flexible sociomoral orientation to others. This work suggests that practices consistent with the evolved developmental niche (EDN), or the developmental system that likely characterized human caregiving over the course of evolution, facilitate development of the physiological and psychological systems of regulation that enable optimal wellbeing in the domain of sociomoral functioning. Aspects of EDN-consistent care provide a cohesive environmental context for development, but different facets of such care correspond to different outcomes related to socioemotional development. Overall, parental positive attitudes toward and provision of EDN-consistent care are associated with an orientation toward others that is prosocial, flexible, and engaged. These findings have emerged in samples in the US, Europe, and China, and suggest that the EDN might provide a useful framework for conceptualizing developmental optimization, for consideration of the important facets of early childhood care and education, and for fostering child wellbeing

The Co-Construction of Virtue: Epigenetics, Development, and Culture

Chapter from the book "Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology." Ed. Nancy E. Snow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014

The Bracing, Empty Self versus the Open, Heart-Minded Self

This article was first published in the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project e-Newsletter 02 (July 2015).N

Moral neuroeducation from early life through the lifespan

Abstract Personality and social development begins before birth in the communication among mother, child and environment, during sensitive periods when the child's brain and body are plastic and epigenetically co-constructed. Triune ethics theory postulates three evolved, neurobiologically-based ethics fostered by early life experience. The security ethic is selfprotective. The engagement ethic is relationally attuned. The imagination ethic can abstract from the present moment and imagine alternatives. Climates and cultures can foster one or another ethic. Ancestral environments were more conducive to moral development. Individuals can adopt self-authorship of their moral character through the development of ethical expertise. Recommendations are made for research and policies that study and support optimal moral development

The Influence of Reading Purpose on Inference Generation and Comprehension in Reading

[EN]There are variations in the extent to which particular types of inferences or activations are made during reading (G. McKoon & R. Ratcliff, 1992; M. Singer, 1994). In this study, the authors investigated the influence of reading purpose (for entertainment or study) on inference generation. Participants read 2 texts aloud and 2 texts for comprehension measures. Reading purpose did not influence off-line behavior (comprehension) but did influence on-line reader behavior (thinking aloud). Readers with a study purpose more often repeated the text, acknowledged a lack of background knowledge, and evaluated the text content and writing than did readers with an entertainment purpose. This pattern was stronger for the expository text than for the narrative text. Reading purpose, and possibly text type, affects the kinds of inferences that readers generate. Hence, inferential activities are at least partially under the reader's strategic control