Morality as a quasi cognitive glue
The most evidence-based approach to moral psychology, as of February 2025, consists of two parts: constructionist psychology and relationship regulation theory. The psychological constructionist approach to morality says that morality is constructed for the same reason all mental phenomena are constructed: to achieve allostasis. This has a number of surprising and important implications:
Morality is inherently self-interested. Morality is not about cooperation, group cohesion, altruism, game theory, etc. It is constructed by a self for the allostasis of the self, full stop.
Morality did not evolve. People did not evolve a moral capacity any more than they evolved an ice skating capacity. Instead, people have parts, and morality turns out to be one of the things that can be constructed with those parts, much like walking.
Morality may not be nice. Morality has often been assumed to be good for people on both an individual and a group level; more morality means a better world, all else held even. Quite frequently morality is definitionally associated with nice things happening and with mean things not happening. However, as morality is constructed for allostasis, there is simply no reason to assume that morality would be restricted to doing nice things. Morality may be mean.
Of course, the brain can construct many mental phenomena, like emotions and memory, in addition to morality. Why would the brain ever construct morality specifically? The answer is that morality is constructed for relationship regulation. Basically, relationship regulation means that people have models of how relationships should work, like models of how children should behave, how romantic partners should treat each other, etc., and act to bring reality into accordance with their expectations. For example, if a child talks out of turn, an adult may correct them. The adult’s behavior is an act of relationship regulation.
The phrase “morality is constructed for relationship regulation” means that when the brain constructs morality, it is because it is updating its expectations about relationships, which are very important to allostasis. Morality motivates acts of relationship regulation. This has a number of surprising and important implications:
Many phenomena are moral. When you shake hands with someone, that is an act of relationship regulation and is morally motivated. Saying “please” and “thank you” are morally motivated acts of relationship regulation as well. Things about the way we sit and stand and the physical postures we adopt in social situations are moral. Morality is being constructed often and in many circumstances that we do not ordinarily think of as moral.
People use morality to find their place in a social equilibrium. People perceive that others have expectations for them; when the brain perceives prediction error with respect to these expectations, it constructs morality.
People use morality to help others find their place in a social equilibrium. The most noteworthy fact about morality is that it motivates other-interested behavior; people will act according to their moral motivations to bring others into line with their relational models. For example, if you see someone cut in line, and you are not in that line yourself, so this does not affect you personally, you will still be morally motivated to correct the line-cutter.
Morality motivates people to find their place in society, and to help others find their places as well, which suggests an analogy to development. Cells finding their place in a collective is the process of morphogenesis; walking similarly occurs with the legs helping each other to find their places. Morality may be thought of as a technology for achieving social development, a social cognitive glue.
There are two important observations that limit the analogy between morality and other cognitive glues. First, cognitive glues are very efficient, moving quickly over long ranges and maintaining a consistent order against many perturbations. Morality does not work this well. Second, cognitive glues such as the price system work by persuading the members of the collective to behave as intended, but morality is often enforced violently. Violence is probably not incentive compatible and so should not be thought of as stress-sharing. Therefore, morality is probably not a true cognitive glue but might be usefully studied as a quasi cognitive glue. For example, morality might be a useful way of examining Aumannian interactions between people, with an emphasis on discovering how moral signals are communicated and how a shared model is formed, thereby constituting a limited and temporary degree of fusion.