Log inMorality, Reciprocity, Fairness, And Property in Primates w/ Sarah Brosnan
Hi, everybody! To end the week, I am sharing with you an interview with Dr. Sarah Brosnan. She is a Professor in the departments of psychology and philosophy and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. She is also a member of the Brains & Behavior program and the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. She directs the Comparative Economics and Behavioral Studies Laboratory (CEBUS Lab) and does research with nonhuman primates at both the Language Research Center of Georgia State University and the Michale E. Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research of the University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center. She studies the mechanisms underlying cooperation, reciprocity, inequity, and other economic decisions in nonhuman primates from an evolutionary perspective. She looks at the decisions individuals make and how they make them, how their social or ecological environments affect their decisions and interactions, and under what circumstances they can alter their behaviors depending on these conditions.
In this episode, we talk about biology, comparative psychology, and moral behavior. First, Dr. Brosnan tells us about the primates that she studies the most and the sorts of behaviors she’s most interested in. Then, we discuss how to properly do comparative psychology, and compare the behavior of humans to other species, particularly primates. We also talk about what is morality from a biological perspective and its functions. And very important to understand morality are the processes of kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and the contentious topic of group selection. After that, we talk about some specific moral behaviors, like inequity aversion and the sense of fairness, and the endowment effect and the sense of property, in nonhuman primates.
Link to podcast version (Anchor): https://bit.ly/2Kzh9B6
