PB438      Half Unit
Crossing Borders: Moral Decision-Making, Intergroup Cooperation and Conflict

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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Humans are a parochial species. We frequently engage in deadly intergroup conflict in the name of imaginary communities like nation, religion or ethnicity. We are also a cooperative species, defined by our ability to cooperate across cultural, political and other group divides. Better understanding of this paradox is critical. Most of us live in culturally diverse societies, we travel and do business across borders. As a species we have to work together across cultural and political boundaries to solve collective problems such as climate change.

This course will investigate the psychology of cross cultural cooperation and conflict. We will ask what particular difficulties face us when we attempt to cooperate across cultural boundaries, how we overcome those difficulties, as well as why cultural conflicts are often associated with violence. We will approach this problem via the lens of moral psychology. We will explore different aspects of moral reasoning, and the way such reasoning can sometimes promote the worst of humanity (war, genocide), and sometimes promote intergroup tolerance and cooperation. In investigating how to foster individual and collective cooperation across cultural divides we will explore contemporary issues around war, migration and climate change.

10 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

The course will be delivered through a combination of interactive classes/seminars and lectures. There will be structured learning activities throughout the course, espeically in the seminars, including student presentations and group work.

Students will write a 1,000-word fully referenced article identifying and evaluating a real world issue involving intergroup relations; they will then propose either research to better understand it, or an intervention to solve it.

• Atari, M., Haidt, J., Graham, J., Koleva, S., Stevens, S. T., & Dehghani, M. (2022). Morality beyond the weird: How thenomological network of morality varies across cultures.
• Atran, S. & Ginges, J. (2012). Religious and sacred imperatives in human conflict. Science, 336, 855-857.
• Baldassarri, Delia; Abascal, Maria (2020). Diversity and prosocial behavior. Science, 369(6508), 1183–1187.doi:10.1126/science.abb2432
• Falk, A., & Szech, N. (2013). Morals and Markets. Science, 340, 707-711.
• Fiske, A. P., & Tetlock, P. E. (1997). Taboo trade-offs: Reactions to transactions that transgress the spheres of justice.Political Psychology, 18, 255-297.
• Ginges, J., Atran, S., & Medin, D. (2007). Sacred bounds on rational resolution of violent political conflict. Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences, 104, 7357-7360.
• Henrich, J., Ensimger, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J. C., Gurven, M., Gwako, E.,Henrich, N., Lesorogol, C., Marlowe, F., Tracer, D., & J. Ziker (2010) Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution ofFairness and Punishment. Science, 327, 1480-1484
• Isler, O., Yilmaz, O., & John Maule, A. (2021). Religion, parochialism and intuitive cooperation. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(4),512-521.
• Medin, D., Ross, N., Cox, D & Atran, S. (2007). Why folkbiology matters: Resource conflict despite shared goals andknowledge. Human Ecology. 35(3), 315-329.
• Mousa, S. (2020). Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in post-ISIS Iraq. Science,369(6505), 866-870.

Presentation (25%)

Essay (75%, 2500 words)