ABSTRACT
Social psychology can make contributions to our understanding of current moral judgments and behavior, and, in turn, conceptions of morality can inform social psychological theories and research. This chapter focuses on prosocial behavior, a potentially rich source of information about the contextual connections among morality-related thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It describes linguistic influences on the evolution of injunctive prosocial norms. The key idea is that prosocial behaviors are often influenced by injunctive norms, which stand at an intermediate meso-level position, between macro-level variables like language and patterns of infections at one end, and micro-level variables like physiological processes at the other end. The evolution of the concept of sin influenced corresponding changes in injunctive prosocial norms, and in acts presumed to redeem sinners from the stain and guilt of their normative transgressions. Building on work by Murray and Schaller, Graziano and Schroeder proposed another historical force influencing prosocial norm evolution, namely cultural differences in reactions to pathogen prevalence and infections.
