Anthropological Institute & Museum

Research Interests

The aim of this PhD project is to investigate the „biological foundations” of human moral behaviour and its psychological underpinnings. Recently, the research for “biological foundations” of human moral behaviour has become a relevant topic in several scientific disciplines. Primatologists began to look for “moral-like” behaviours and could actually observe behaviours like consolation, reconciliation, mediation as well as policing in several nonhuman primates, especially in chimpanzees. Nevertheless, we are still far away from understanding the biological roots of human moral behaviour. Morality is a human concept and is concerned with what people ought to do and what they ought not to do. Moreover, morality enables us to adjust our behaviour to the prevailing rules or social norms of a society. The function of these rules or social norms is to maintain social order and to provide prosocial behaviour and cooperation among the members within a society. Until now, the existence and enforcement of social norms are considered to be uniquely human features. My PhD project picks up this assumption and asks whether it is possible that our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, possess evolutionary precursors of morality and whether they are capable to form and enforce social norms in their groups. Our working hypothesis is that at its basis, human morality has an intuitive core composed of a set of moral emotions and motivations and that this intuitive core is already present in chimpanzees and perhaps in other nonhuman group-living primates. To verify this hypothesis we designed a set of experiments that will test for the existence of social norms in a captive chimpanzee group. Behavioural observation will accompany and complete these experiments. Whether an intuitive core is already present or not in other group-living nonhuman primates will have implications for ethics and is indispensable for a comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon from a multidisciplinary point of view that tries to unify the perspective of philosophers, social scientists, neurobiologists and anthropologists.