Leda Cosmides

Skip to main content Guzmán et al. (1) show that people can make compromise moral judgments balancing deontological and utilitarian considerations. They make innovative use of dilemmas with more than two options, including compromise options. I commend the authors on their valuable research and accept most of their conclusions. However, the authors frame their research using the dual-process theory (DPT) of moral judgment (2–4) as a foil, reflecting a misunderstanding of that theory.

2.2.1 Reciprocation and punishment in the TGP. Before the TGP, participants were told that they were going to be given points that could be used during the interaction. They were asked to imagine that the points they earned would be converted to real money at the end of the study. In the TGP, participants experienced both roles, truster and responder (order counterbalanced across participants).

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UCSB July 7, 1997 Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books on Stephen Jay Gould's "Darwinian Fundamentalism" (June 12, 1997) and "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism" (June 26, 1997) John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by...