Dr%20Oliver%20Scott%20Curry: List of publications

What do children think makes an act kind? Which kind acts are children likely to perform? Previous research with adults suggests that the kindness of acts depends largely on the benefit provided and to a lesser extent on the cost incurred, and that adults are more likely to perform low-cost, high-benefit kind acts. In the current study, children (9-12 years, n = 945) and teens (13-17 years, n = 939) rated the benefit, cost, kindness, and likelihood of performing 173 acts of kindness, and adults (18+ years, n = 891) rated how beneficial, costly, kind, and likely the acts would be for young people to perform. Among children and teens, benefit but not cost predicted the kindness of acts, and benefit positively predicted, but cost negatively predicted, performance (for "kindness quotients" of 61% and 65%, respectively). Among adults, benefit and cost predicted the kindness of acts, and cost, but not benefit, negatively predicted performance (for a kindness quotient of 59%). The results for children and teens are similar to those from previous research with adults; however, adults are more sensitive to cost when rating kindness, are less sensitive to benefit when rating performance by young people, and are less likely to think young people will perform acts of kindness overall. In practical terms, the results suggest that recommending cost-effective acts may be the best way to encourage children to be kinder.

What is morality? And to what extent does it vary around the world? The theory of “morality-as-cooperation” argues that morality consists of a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. Morality-as-cooperation draws on the theory of non-zero-sum games to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior—including helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession—will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures. To test these predictions, we investigate the moral valence of these seven cooperative behaviors in the ethnographic records of 60 societies. We find that the moral valence of these behaviors is uniformly positive, and the majority of these cooperative morals are observed in the majority of cultures, with equal frequency across all regions of the world. We conclude that these seven cooperative behaviors are plausible candidates for universal moral rules, and that morality-as-cooperation could provide the unified theory of morality that anthropology has hitherto lacked.

This experiment investigates the effects of a seven-day kindness activities intervention on changes in subjective happiness. The study was designed to test whether performing different types of kindness activities had differential effects on happiness. Our recent systematic review and meta-analysis of the psychological effects of kindness (Curry, et al. 2018) revealed that performing acts of kindness boosts happiness and well-being. However, we noted in that review that rarely had researchers specifically compared the effects of kindness to different recipients, such as to friends or to strangers. Thus in a single factorial design (n=683) we compare acts of kindness to strong social ties, weak social ties, novel acts of self kindness, and observing acts of kindness, against a no acts control group. The results indicate that performing kindness activities for seven days increases happiness. In addition, we report a positive correlation between the number of kind acts and increases in happiness. Neither effect differed across the experimental the groups, suggesting that kindness to strong ties, to weak ties, and to self, as well as observing acts of kindness, have equally positive effects on happiness.

Do acts of kindness improve the well-being of the actor? Recent advances in the behavioural sciences have provided a number of explanations of human social, cooperative and altruistic behaviour. These theories predict that people will be ‘happy to help’ family, friends, community members, spouses, and even strangers under some conditions. Here we conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the experimental evidence that kindness interventions (for example, performing ‘random acts of kindness’) boost subjective well-being. Our initial search of the literature identified 489 articles; of which 24 (27 studies) met the inclusion criteria (total N = 4045). These 27 studies, some of which included multiple control conditions and dependent measures, yielded 52 effect sizes. Multi-level modeling revealed that the overall effect of kindness on the well-being of the actor is small-to-medium (δ = 0.28). The effect was not moderated by sex, age, type of participant, intervention, control condition or outcome measure. There was no indication of publication bias. We discuss the limitations of the current literature, and recommend that future research test more specific theories of kindness: taking kindness-specific individual differences into account; distinguishing between the effects of kindness to specific categories of people; and considering a wider range of proximal and distal outcomes. Such research will advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of kindness, and help practitioners to maximise the effectiveness of kindness interventions to improve well-being.

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others' valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = +0.82) and foreign (mean r = +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.

<p>Your country is under attack and you are preparing to join the fight to defend it. Just then, your mother calls and tells you she is seriously ill and needs your help. Do you take care of your mother, or do you abandon her to fi ght for your country? You are a member of a sports team that always loses to a rival team. You have an opportunity to join that rival team. Do you take it? You borrow £10 from a wealthy friend. The friend forgets all about it. Do you give him the £10 back? You and another friend are walking along the street when you spot a £20 note on the ground. You bend down and pick it up. Do you offer to share it with your friend?</p> <br/> <p>In most people, these scenarios evoke a range of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and intuitions about what to do, what is the right thing to do, what one ought to do—what is the moralthing to do. What are these moral thoughts and feelings, where do they come from, how do they work, and what are they for? Scholars have struggled with these questions for millennia, and for many people the nature of morality is so baffling that they assume it must have a supernatural origin. </p> <br/> <p>The good news is that we now have a scientific answer to these questions. Previous approaches have noticed that morality has something to do with cooperation (see Table 1). But now it is possible to use the mathematical theory of cooperation—the theory of nonzero-sum games—to transform this commonplace into a precise and comprehensive theory, capable of making specific testable predictions about the nature of morality.</p> <br/> <p>In this chapter, I use game theory to identify the fundamental problems of human social life, and show how—in principle and in practice—they are solved. I argue hat it is the solutions to these problems that philosophers and others have called ‘morality’. Thus, morality turns out to be a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social life. I show how this theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ incorporates the best elements of previous theories, and moves beyond them to create a principled taxonomy of moral values of unprecedented depth and breadth. I derive from this theory testable predictions about the structure and content of moral thought and outline how they differ from those of rival theories. And I conclude that, because the debate between these theories can be resolved using standard scientifi c method, the study of morality has at last become a branch of science. </p>

Cooperation requires that individuals are able to identify, and preferentially associate with, others who have compatible preferences and the shared background knowledge needed to solve interpersonal coordination problems. This body of shared knowledge constitute a substantial proportion of what is called 'culture'. It has been argued that, for this reason, individuals prefer to associate with others who share their culture, and also that shared appreciation of humor provides a particularly effective means of identifying others with the relevant preferences and knowledge. The present experiment uses a 'dummy rating procedure' to compare the effects of sharing an appreciation of non-humorous (first lines of novels) and humorous (jokes) cultural stimuli on interpersonal affiliation, altruism and assessment. The results show that the degree of shared appreciation for both sets of stimuli had a positive effect on Affiliation; only humorous stimuli had an effect on Altruism; and neither effected the Assessment of others' personal traits. Thus, the results support the general theory that shared culture promotes affiliation, and provide evidence of the special role of humor in interpersonal relations. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.