TY - JOUR T1 - Evolution of empathetic moral evaluation JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/447151 SP - 447151 AU - Arunas L. Radzvilavicius AU - Alexander J. Stewart AU - Joshua B. Plotkin Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/18/447151.abstract N2 - Social norms can promote cooperation in human societies by assigning reputations to individuals based on their past actions. A good reputation indicates that an individual is worthy of help and is likely to reciprocate. A large body of research has established the norms of moral assessment that promote cooperation and maximize social welfare, assuming reputations are objective. But if there is no centralized institution to provide objective moral evaluation, then opinions about an individual’s reputation may differ across a population. Here we use evolutionary game theory to study the effects of empathy – the capacity to make moral evaluations from the perspective of another person. We find that empathetic moral evaluation tends to foster cooperation by reducing the rate of unjustified defection. The norms of moral evaluation previously considered most socially beneficial depend on high levels of empathy, whereas different norms are required to maximize social welfare in populations unwilling or incapable of empathy. We demonstrate that empathy itself can evolve through social contagion and attain evolutionary stability under most social norms. We conclude that a capacity for empathetic moral evaluation represents a key component to sustaining cooperation in human societies: cooperation requires getting into the mindset of others whose views differ from our own. ER -