Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’

Suppose the gods were to flip a coin on the day of your birth. Heads, you will be a supremely honest and fair person throughout your life, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a scoundrel. Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a paragon of virtue. Which outcome would you

Belyaev moved to a Siberian research institute, where he decided to test his ideas by conducting a simple breeding experiment with foxes. Rather than selecting foxes based on the quality of their pelts, as fox breeders would normally do, he selected them for tameness. Whichever fox pups were least fearful of humans were bred to create the next

The male mind appears to be innately tribal—that is, structured in advance of experience so that boys and men enjoy doing the sorts of things that lead to group cohesion and success in conflicts between groups (including warfare).20 The virtue of loyalty matters a great deal to both sexes, though the objects of loyalty tend to be teams and

BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS

For example, if you hear someone running up behind you on a dark street, your fear system detects a threat and triggers your sympathetic nervous system, firing up the fight-or-flight response, cranking up your heart rate, and widening your pupils to help you take in more information.

Darwin believed that morality was an adaptation that evolved by natural selection operating at the individual level and at the group level.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

“Is moral thinking any different from other kinds of thinking?” I said that thinking about moral issues (such as whether abortion is wrong) seemed different from thinking about other kinds of questions (such as where to go to dinner tonight), because of the much greater need to provide reasons justifying your moral judgments to other people.