Despite burgeoning as a field of study, and despite receiving substantial attention outside of academia – now – Justice Sotomayor’s “empathy” kerfuffle as the most prominent example – law and emotions has received little treatment as a unified field. A book-length treatment a decade...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

Methods of statistical physics have proven valuable for studying the evolution of cooperation in social dilemma games. However, recent empirical research shows that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is only one kind of a more general class of behavior, namely moral behavior, which includes...

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer to a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant...

Lies can have profoundly negative consequences for individuals, groups, and even for societies. Understanding how lying evolves and when it proliferates is therefore of significant importance for our personal and societal well-being. To that effect, we here study the sender-receiver game in...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

The most successful human societies are those that have found better ways to promote cooperative behaviour. Yet, cooperation is individually costly and, therefore, it often breaks down, leading to enormous social costs. In this article, I review the literature on the mechanisms and interventions...

Generative artificial intelligence holds enormous potential to revolutionize decision-making processes, from everyday to high-stake scenarios. However, as many decisions carry social implications, for AI to be a reliable assistant for decision-making it is crucial that it is able to capture the...

There is robust experimental evidence that in the ultimatum game real players often prefer a fair allocation which seems to be in contrast to rational decision making. In this paper rational maximizing behavior as well as norm-guided fair behavior are two possible behavioral rules. It is argued...

We claim that the emergence of trust is best explained by relation-based arguments. After briefly surveying alternative explanations which concentrate on material payoffs both with self-centered and with other-regarding preferences, we examine theoretical discussions of cooperative and trust...