Prof Jeremy Ginges

This course is available on the MSc in Behavioural Science, MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology, MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and MSc in Societal and Environmental Psychology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: All PBS 0.5-unit courses in Winter Term are controlled access and capped. Students enrolled on PBS programmes will be given priority.

Each course is available with permission as an outside option to students outside of PBS where regulations permit, providing there is space. All students must submit a short statement (around 100 words) outlining their motivation for enrolling on the course, which will be considered by the course convenor.

Deadline for application: Please apply as soon as possible after the opening of course selection for all courses.

For queries contact: Pbs.msc@lse.ac.uk

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. We are defined by our ability to cooperate across cultural, political and other group divides. How do we cooperate despite our parochialism, when and why do we fail? Understanding how we make these choices is critical if we are to do better at working together to across cultural and political boundaries to solve collective problems such as climate change, the rise of AI, or the next pandemic.

This course will investigate the psychology of cross cultural cooperation and conflict. We will investigate the 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 decision-making. 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 Winter Term.

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

10 minute recorded presentation accompanied by an annotated reference list

• 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.

Course participation (30%).

Video (70%).