ArticleNature human behaviour2020
The origins of criminal law.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cross-cultural evidence that shame is a defense against reputational damage.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Why Motive Matters: The Appraisal of Criminal Aims.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Laws about bodily damage originate from shared intuitions about the value of body parts.Science advances · 2025Article
- The Double Standard of Ownership.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- The social leverage effect: Institutions transform weak reputation effects into strong incentives for cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Legal provisions on medical aid in dying encode moral intuition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evidence against the "anomalous-is-bad" stereotype in Hadza hunter gatherers.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- How pride works.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Universal facial expressions uncovered in art of the ancient Americas: A computational approach.Science advances · 2020Article
- The Shame System Operates With High Precision.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
- Are Emotions Natural Kinds After All? Rethinking the Issue of Response Coherence.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Laws against wrongdoing may originate in justice intuitions that are part of universal human nature, according to the adaptationist theory of the origins of criminal law. This theory proposes that laws can be traced to neurocognitive mechanisms and ancestral selection pressures. According to this theory, laypeople can intuitively recreate the laws of familiar and unfamiliar cultures, even when they lack the relevant explicit knowledge. Here, to evaluate this prediction, we conduct experiments with Chinese and Sumerian laws that are millennia old; stimuli that preserve in fossil-like form the legal thinking of ancient lawmakers. We show that laypeople's justice intuitions closely match the logic and content of those archaic laws. We also show covariation across different types of justice intuitions: interpersonal devaluation of offenders, judgements of moral wrongness, mock-legislated punishments and perpetrator shame-suggesting that multiple justice intuitions may be regulated by a common social-evaluative psychology. Although alternative explanations of these findings are possible, we argue that they are consistent with the assumption that the origin of criminal law is a cognitively sophisticated human nature.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.