Subproject B

ORCID: 0000-0002-6523-5471

Subproject B uses experimental methods to test participants’ metaethical attitudes along the realism/antirealism divide and their cooperation skills in two-person (1–6) and n-person (7–9) Stag Hunt games.

Metaethical task:

Participants will be shown vignettes describing moral, political, and religious violations like “A knife enthusiast tests a new knife’s sharpness by randomly stabbing a pedestrian,” “An influential government official secretly accepts bribes to favor certain policies,” and “A follower of a strict religious sect publicly destroys religious symbols of a different faith.” In the vignettes, a normative judge disagrees with the violations, while an antinormative judge agrees with them. The latter matches the participant’s culture in the same-culture condition and differs in the other-culture condition. These conditions will explore how sociocultural distance affects metaethical attitudes across normative disputes. Follow-up questions will measure participants’ perceptions of each scenario’s moral, political, or religious significance. Trigger warnings will be provided for sensitive content. Debriefing and support will be offered after the study.

Participants will rate three statements on a 7-point scale for each vignette. Scores below 4 indicate disagreement, and above 4 indicate agreement. Cognitivism statement: “Do you believe that their different views represent factual statements that can be true or false?” This tests the belief that moral claims can be true or false propositions (cognitivism). Truthfulness statement: “Do you think that at least one of the conflicting moral statements made by the judges is true?” This gauges the belief that some moral claims are indeed true (truthfulness). Objectivism statement: “Do you agree that moral truths in this case are independent of judges’ beliefs and their cultural or personal differences?” This evaluates the belief in the independence of moral truths from individual and cultural perspectives (objectivism). To distinguish those who lean toward subjectivism (moral truths contingent upon individual beliefs) from those who adopt a more general form of relativism (moral truths relative to cultural or group perspectives), participants who disagree with the objectivism statement will receive the follow-up question: “Do you believe that moral truths depend solely on the individual beliefs of each person, rather than being influenced by broader cultural or societal norms?”

Based on their responses, participants’ metaethical outlooks will be categorized as shown in Table 1.

Cooperation task:

In a between-participants design, half of the participants will play a two-person Stag Hunt game, while the other half will engage in an n-person version of the game. Participants will be tested in two conditions: same-group and other-group, allowing the exploration of how sociocultural distance, cultural diversity, and metaethical attitudes influence cooperative behavior. The aim is to understand how cultural identity and metanormative attitudes shape cooperative choices.

The study will use the Cultural Fixation Index (CF_ST) to select a representative sample of Western and non-Western societies, emphasizing typically underrepresented cultures in metaethical research. Sociocultural distance will be primarily operationalized through the same-culture or other-culture conditions of the experimental tasks. The CF_ST will be utilized as a secondary measure to leverage its ability to disaggregate data on moral, political, and religious values (see https://world.culturalytics.com). This setup enables the quantitative study of differences in normative beliefs and their impact on cooperative behavior. By integrating these cultural dimensions, Subproject B aims to elucidate the interplay between sociocultural distance, metanormative attitudes, and cooperation in homogenous and culturally diverse contexts.

Drawing upon the sociocultural distance effect, where individuals’ metaethical outlooks vary based on cultural proximity (10–12), the subproject hypothesizes that individuals’ perceptions of moral disagreements are influenced by the sociocultural distance between the disagreeing parties. Key predictions from this hypothesis include (i) a stronger alignment with robust moral realism within a given culture, indicating a more rigid attitude toward moral disagreements; (ii) increasing alignment with moral antirealist views in the other-culture conditions, particularly nonobjectivist attitudes, reflecting a progression toward more flexible attitudes toward moral disagreements; (iii) stronger attitudes of robust moral realism toward moral disagreements compared to other normative domains; (iv) a correlation between metaethical attitudes and cooperative strategies in Stag Hunt games, where robust moral realists have a stronger preference for risk-dominant choices (hunt the hare) due to a cautious approach toward cooperation, and moral antirealists, especially those with nonobjectivist leanings, opting more frequently for payoff-dominant choices (hunt the stag), indicative of a more collaborative approach in situations involving sociocultural diversity. In addition to these predictions, the study will also pursue exploratory questions about variations in cooperative behavior across different Stag Hunt game formats (two-person vs. n-person), normative domains, and the influence of participants’ cultural backgrounds and groups’ cultural diversity on metaethical attitudes and cooperation strategies. The n-person Stag Hunt game assumes a group size of 10, based on estimates of Early Holocene traveling groups (13). For details on the payoff matrix, refer to Subproject C’s methodology.

Return to Prospective Research.

References

1. van Damme, E. E. C. & Carlsson, H. Equilibrium selection in stag hunt games. in Frontiers of Game Theory (eds. Binmore, K. G. & Kirman, A. P.) 237–254 (MIT Press, 1993). 2. Rankin, F. W., Van Huyck, J. B. & Battalio, R. C. Strategic Similarity and Emergent Conventions: Evidence from Similar Stag Hunt Games. Games and Economic Behavior 32, 315–337 (2000). 3. Bosworth, S. J. Social capital and equilibrium selection in Stag Hunt games. Journal of Economic Psychology 39, 11–20 (2013). 4. Golman, R. & Page, S. E. Individual and cultural learning in stag hunt games with multiple actions. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 73, 359–376 (2010). 5. Van Huyck, J. & Stahl, D. O. Conditional behavior and learning in similar stag hunt games. Exp Econ 21, 513–526 (2018). 6. Boudreau, J. W., Rentschler, L. & Sanders, S. Stag hunt contests and alliance formation. Public Choice 179, 267–285 (2019). 7. Pacheco, J. M., Santos, F. C., Souza, M. O. & Skyrms, B. Evolutionary dynamics of collective action in N -person stag hunt dilemmas. Proc. R. Soc. B. 276, 315–321 (2009). 8. Riedl, A., Rohde, I. M. T. & Strobel, M. Free neighborhood choice boosts socially optimal outcomes in stag-hunt coordination problem. Sci Rep 11, 7745 (2021). 9. Luo, Q., Liu, L. & Chen, X. Evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in the N-person stag hunt game. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 424, 132943 (2021). 10. Sarkissian, H., Park, J., Tien, D., Wright, J. C. & Knobe, J. Folk Moral Relativism. Mind & Language 26, 482–505 (2011). 11. Heiphetz, L. & Young, L. L. Can only one person be right? The development of objectivism and social preferences regarding widely shared and controversial moral beliefs. Cognition (2016) doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.05.014. 12. Schmidt, M. F. H., Gonzalez-Cabrera, I. & Tomasello, M. Children’s developing metaethical judgments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 164, 163–177 (2017). 13. Brooks, A. S. et al. Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age. Science 360, 90–94 (2018).