What is morality, and where does it come from? Why are some aspects of morality common to all societies, and how and why do some aspects vary? How do people decide to 'do the right thing'? Recent advances in evolutionary biology, game theory, animal behaviour, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience shed new light on these ancient questions.

Evolutionary biology suggests that organisms consist of a large number of evolved mechanisms, or "adaptations", each designed by natural selection to solve a particular problem of survival and reproduction -- problems such as finding food, avoiding predators, choosing a mate, selecting a habitat, and getting along with others. Game theory has enabled biologists to distinguish between several different types of social, cooperative and altruistic behaviour, and has helped to generate specific predictions about the kinds of 'social instincts' we should expect to find in nature. And, equipped with these hypotheses, the study of animal behaviour has discovered that a wide variety of species possess adaptations for social life -- many organisms practise parental care, form teams and herds, exchange favours, and settle disputes without coming to blows.

Turning to humans, there is no reason to suppose that such adaptations have been erased by natural selection during the course of our evolution. As Charles Darwin put it: "[I]t can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man?" And, indeed, evolutionary psychology is beginning to reveal the details of human adaptations for social life. As expected, humans seem to possess sophisticated adaptations for caring for family members, making friends, adopting local conventions, keeping promises, punishing cheats, resolving disputes peacefully, respecting others' property, and so on. As a consequence, we care deeply about these aspects of social life, and are adept at thinking about them. Not only do these adaptations provide the springs of our own social behaviour, they also provide the criteria by which we judge the behaviour of others. And these adaptations are what philosophers have called 'moral sentiments' -- love and loyalty, trust and honesty, guilt and gratitude, retribution and respect.

Members of the Evolutionary Moral Psychology Group (EMPG) are actively investigating the components of human evolved social and moral psychology. In common with other branches of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary moral psychology begins by specifying the recurrent problems of social life that our ancestors faced. Equipped with an account of such problems, they then propose alternative adaptive solutions (adaptations), and conduct experiments to test for them. Members of the group also attempt to make sense of existing data on moral thought and behaviour by investigating whether they are the products of adaptations designed to provide efficient solutions to recurrent problems of social life. Members of EMPG are currently working on the adaptive basis of: kin-recognition, incest avoidance, attitudes to abortion, partner choice, reasoning about moral rules, patience, punishment, guilt, bargaining, and generosity. The long-term aim of this research is to arrive at a full circuit-diagram of human moral psychology.