Peter Descioli
Biographic Data
| ID | 225147 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Descioli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Descioli |
| SIGNATURE | DESCIOLI P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stony Brook University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5915-8564 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Evolutionary psychology did not make people blame the victim: Comment on Persson and Hostler (2026)
Do Voters Understand the Benefits of Taxes?
We use economic experiments to study a fundamental question in political economy: Do voters understand the benefits of taxes? Participants play an economic game as members of a virtual society composed of computer players. In each round, the players earn low or high income, see the distribution of income, and then vote for low or high taxes. We test whether participants vote rationally for high taxes when poor and low taxes when rich, following a…
Standing on principle: How moral principles can excuse disloyalty
Prevention or relief? Voters' support for disaster policies
Researchers have argued that preventing disasters is more efficient than providing relief. Yet, previous scholarship has found that voters in the United States reward politicians more for relief than for prevention policies. It is unclear, however, whether they truly favour relief policies or if they are simply more aware of them. In this article we report on an experiment in which American participants read about a fictional community facing a t…
What happens in vagueness
Indirect restrictions demobilize supporters of abortion rights
State governments have created a multitude of indirect restrictions on abortion in the decades since Roe v. Wade . Here we test whether indirect restrictions demobilize abortion supporters relative to direct restrictions. We draw on research from moral psychology showing that people judge indirect offenses as less morally wrong than direct offenses, holding constant the consequences of the offenses. In two experiments, pro‐choice participants ans…
On the origin of laws by natural selection
Pay Your Debts: Moral Dilemmas of International Debt
Piled Modifiers, Buried Verbs, and Other Turgid Prose in the American Political Science Review
Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describ…
Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties
When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures
In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in w…
Moral Obstinacy in Political Negotiations
Research in behavioral economics finds that moral considerations bear on the offers that people make and accept in negotiations. This finding is relevant forpoliticalnegotiations, wherein moral concerns are manifold. However, behavioral economics has yet to incorporate a major theme from moral psychology: People differ, sometimes immensely, in which issues they perceive to be a matter of morality. We review research about the measurement and char…
Selfish and Cooperative Voting: Can the Majority Restrain Themselves
Unfair Rules for Unequal Pay: Wage Discrimination and Procedural Justice
Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulat…
Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide
Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying peopl…
Common knowledge, coordination, and the logic of self-conscious emotions
Alliance Formation in a Side-Taking Experiment
We investigate in an economic experiment how people choose sides in disputes. In an eight-player side-taking game, two disputants at a time fight over an indivisible resource and other group members choose sides. The player with more supporters wins the resource, which is worth real money. Conflicts occur spontaneously between any two individuals in the group. Players choose sides by ranking their loyalties to everyone else in the group, and they…
Need, Compassion, and Support for Social Welfare
Funding for social welfare depends on citizen support. Drawing on evolutionary psychological approaches to politics, we study two types of need that might shape citizens' welfare support by regulating their feelings of compassion. One type of need is a recipient's absolute need. The other type is acute need created by sudden misfortune, such as sudden job loss. Across four studies, we find that absolute and acute needs independently affect compas…
Share the Wealth: Redistribution Can Increase Economic Efficiency
Watch out! How a fearful face adds credibility to warnings of danger
Whoever is not with me is against me: The costs of neutrality among friends
People's Judgments About Classic Property Law Cases
New Appointments
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The psychology of coordination and common knowledge
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in whic…
Disgust: Evolved function and structure.
Interest in and research on disgust has surged over the past few decades. The field, however, still lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the evolved function or functions of disgust. Here we present such a framework, emphasizing 2 levels of analysis: that of evolved function and that of information processing. Although there is widespread agreement that disgust evolved to motivate the avoidance of contact with disease-causing …
A solution to the mysteries of morality
We propose that moral condemnation functions to guide bystanders to choose the same side as other bystanders in disputes. Humans interact in dense social networks, and this poses a problem for bystanders when conflicts arise: which side, if any, to support. Choosing sides is a difficult strategic problem because the outcome of a conflict critically depends on which side other bystanders support. One strategy is siding with the higher status dispu…
Moral Obstinacy in Political Negotiations
Research in behavioral economics finds that moral considerations bear on the offers that people make and accept in negotiations. This finding is relevant forpoliticalnegotiations, wherein moral concerns are manifold. However, behavioral economics has yet to incorporate a major theme from moral psychology: People differ, sometimes immensely, in which issues they perceive to be a matter of morality. We review research about the measurement and char…
Need, Compassion, and Support for Social Welfare
Funding for social welfare depends on citizen support. Drawing on evolutionary psychological approaches to politics, we study two types of need that might shape citizens' welfare support by regulating their feelings of compassion. One type of need is a recipient's absolute need. The other type is acute need created by sudden misfortune, such as sudden job loss. Across four studies, we find that absolute and acute needs independently affect compas…
The psychology of coordination and common knowledge
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in whic…
Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide
Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying peopl…
Best Friends: Alliances, Friend Ranking, and the MySpace Social Network
Like many topics of psychological research, the explanation for friendship is at once intuitive and difficult to address empirically. These difficulties worsen when one seeks, as we do, to go beyond "obvious" explanations ("humans are social creatures") to ask deeper questions, such as "What is the evolved function of human friendship?" In recent years, however, a new window into human behavior has opened as a growing fraction of people's social …
Giving to whom? Altruism in different types of relationships
Whoever is not with me is against me: The costs of neutrality among friends
When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures
In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in w…
Share the Wealth: Redistribution Can Increase Economic Efficiency
People's Judgments About Classic Property Law Cases
Pay Your Debts: Moral Dilemmas of International Debt
Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties
Unfair Rules for Unequal Pay: Wage Discrimination and Procedural Justice
Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulat…
Reciprocity in groups: Information‐seeking in a public goods game
Questions remain about the details of the reciprocal strategies people use in the context of group cooperation. Here we report an experiment in which participants in public goods games could access information about the lowest, median, or highest contribution to the public good before making their own contribution decisions. Results suggest that people have clear preferences for particular pieces of information and that information preferences va…
Withdrawn: Audience effects on moralistic punishment☆
Audience effects on moralistic punishment
Reciprocity in groups: Information‐seeking in a public goods game
Questions remain about the details of the reciprocal strategies people use in the context of group cooperation. Here we report an experiment in which participants in public goods games could access information about the lowest, median, or highest contribution to the public good before making their own contribution decisions. Results suggest that people have clear preferences for particular pieces of information and that information preferences va…
The Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship
BACKGROUND: Exploration of the cognitive systems underlying human friendship will be advanced by identifying the evolved functions these systems perform. Here we propose that human friendship is caused, in part, by cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support groups for potential conflicts. We use game theory to identify computations about friends that can increase performance in multi-agent conflicts. This analysis suggests that people woul…
Mysteries of morality
Heavy hearts and heads held high — A review of Glimpses of Creatures in Their Physical Worlds
The omission effect in moral cognition: Toward a functional explanation
The territorial foundations of human property
Best Friends: Alliances, Friend Ranking, and the MySpace Social Network
Like many topics of psychological research, the explanation for friendship is at once intuitive and difficult to address empirically. These difficulties worsen when one seeks, as we do, to go beyond "obvious" explanations ("humans are social creatures") to ask deeper questions, such as "What is the evolved function of human friendship?" In recent years, however, a new window into human behavior has opened as a growing fraction of people's social …
Fairness versus favoritism in children
Hamilton vs. Kant: Pitting adaptations for altruism against adaptations for moral judgment
Disgust: Evolved function and structure.
Interest in and research on disgust has surged over the past few decades. The field, however, still lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the evolved function or functions of disgust. Here we present such a framework, emphasizing 2 levels of analysis: that of evolved function and that of information processing. Although there is widespread agreement that disgust evolved to motivate the avoidance of contact with disease-causing …
Giving to whom? Altruism in different types of relationships
A solution to the mysteries of morality
We propose that moral condemnation functions to guide bystanders to choose the same side as other bystanders in disputes. Humans interact in dense social networks, and this poses a problem for bystanders when conflicts arise: which side, if any, to support. Choosing sides is a difficult strategic problem because the outcome of a conflict critically depends on which side other bystanders support. One strategy is siding with the higher status dispu…
New Appointments
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The psychology of coordination and common knowledge
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in whic…
People's Judgments About Classic Property Law Cases
Watch out! How a fearful face adds credibility to warnings of danger
Whoever is not with me is against me: The costs of neutrality among friends
Common knowledge, coordination, and the logic of self-conscious emotions
Alliance Formation in a Side-Taking Experiment
We investigate in an economic experiment how people choose sides in disputes. In an eight-player side-taking game, two disputants at a time fight over an indivisible resource and other group members choose sides. The player with more supporters wins the resource, which is worth real money. Conflicts occur spontaneously between any two individuals in the group. Players choose sides by ranking their loyalties to everyone else in the group, and they…
Need, Compassion, and Support for Social Welfare
Funding for social welfare depends on citizen support. Drawing on evolutionary psychological approaches to politics, we study two types of need that might shape citizens' welfare support by regulating their feelings of compassion. One type of need is a recipient's absolute need. The other type is acute need created by sudden misfortune, such as sudden job loss. Across four studies, we find that absolute and acute needs independently affect compas…
Share the Wealth: Redistribution Can Increase Economic Efficiency
Unfair Rules for Unequal Pay: Wage Discrimination and Procedural Justice
Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulat…
Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide
Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying peopl…
Psychology (29 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (15 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works)