ABOUT
The Moral Intuitions Lab (MINT Lab), directed by Prof. Onurcan Yılmaz at Kadir Has University, investigates one of the central questions of the human sciences:
How do humans transcend local loyalties, immediate intuitions, and self-interest to build cooperation with strangers, sustain moral communities, and create large-scale societies?
Humans are an unusual species. We are capable of extraordinary cooperation, extending concern far beyond kinship groups to nations, institutions, and even humanity as a whole. Yet we are also vulnerable to tribalism, ideological conflict, conspiracy thinking, and moral exclusion. Understanding how these opposing tendencies emerge—and how they can be shaped—is the central mission of our lab.
To address this challenge, we integrate insights from social psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, cultural evolution, and moral philosophy. Our research examines how intuitive and reflective cognition interact with cultural learning, social institutions, and ecological conditions to shape moral judgment, cooperation, political attitudes, religious beliefs, and collective behavior.
Our Theoretical Framework
Our work is grounded in Dual Inheritance Theory, which views human behavior as the product of two interacting inheritance systems.
The first is a biological inheritance system that equips individuals with evolved psychological tendencies, including threat sensitivity, coalition formation, reciprocity, social learning, agency detection, and in-group favoritism. These mechanisms helped humans navigate ancestral environments and remain influential today.
The second is a cultural inheritance system through which norms, values, institutions, technologies, religions, ideologies, and knowledge accumulate across generations. Unlike other species, humans inherit not only genes but also cultural traditions that profoundly shape how they perceive and navigate the world.
From this perspective, morality is neither solely a product of evolution nor merely a cultural construction. It emerges from the continuous interaction between biological predispositions and culturally transmitted systems.
Cooperation as the Central Problem
Although our projects span diverse topics, they are united by a common objective: understanding the conditions under which humans cooperate beyond narrow group boundaries.
We investigate four interconnected levels of explanation:
1. Biological Foundations
Human cooperation is built upon evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms, including reciprocity, fairness concerns, reputation management, threat detection, and group psychology. These mechanisms provide the psychological foundation upon which moral systems are built.
2. Cultural Learning
Religions, ideologies, social norms, and collective narratives shape how these biological tendencies are expressed. Cultural systems can expand moral concern, strengthen cooperation, and sustain social order, but they can also reinforce parochialism, polarization, and intergroup conflict.
3. Reflection and Reasoning
Humans possess the unique ability to reflect on their intuitions, evaluate norms, and imagine alternative social arrangements. Reflection can help individuals overcome biases and coordinate around broader principles. However, it can also be recruited in service of identity defense and motivated reasoning. Understanding when reflection promotes open-mindedness versus polarization is one of our core research interests.
4. Institutions and Contexts
Human behavior is profoundly shaped by the environments in which it occurs. Threats, scarcity, inequality, and social uncertainty can activate different psychological tendencies. At the same time, institutions such as science, law, democracy, education, and religion can channel human motivations toward cooperation or conflict. We therefore study not only individual minds but also the larger systems in which those minds operate.
Together, these levels form an integrated framework for understanding how moral judgments, belief systems, and cooperative behavior emerge and change across cultures and historical periods.
Our Research Program
MINT Lab investigates a broad range of phenomena through this common lens.
Reflection and Intuition
We study how different modes of thinking influence religious belief, ideological commitments, conspiracy theories, scientific attitudes, moral judgment, and prosocial behavior.
Threats, Crises, and Social Change
We examine how collective threats (including pandemics, natural disasters, terrorism, and economic hardship) reshape cooperation, generosity, trust, and intergroup relations.
Morality Across Cultures
We investigate how moral norms emerge, spread, and persist across societies, comparing WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations to better understand the universal and culturally variable aspects of human morality.
Belief Systems and Social Coordination
We explore how religions, political ideologies, conspiracy theories, and institutional trust function as systems that help individuals interpret uncertainty, coordinate behavior, and navigate complex social environments.
Institutions and Cultural Evolution
We investigate how individual minds, cultural norms, and social institutions co-evolve over time, shaping the emergence of moral systems, collective behavior, and large-scale cooperation in human societies.
Methodological Approach
MINT Lab is committed to rigorous, transparent, and cumulative science.
Our research combines behavioral experiments, economic games, moral dilemmas, longitudinal studies, computational approaches, and large-scale cross-cultural surveys. We actively preregister studies, share data and materials, replicate influential findings, and maintain centralized research infrastructures that promote reproducibility and collaboration.
Our goal is not only to generate new findings but also to build coherent theoretical frameworks that connect isolated results into a broader understanding of human behavior.
Looking Forward
The long-term ambition of MINT Lab is to contribute to a unified science of morality, cooperation, and belief systems. Rather than treating morality, religion, ideology, institutions, and cognition as separate domains, we seek to understand how they jointly emerge from the interaction between evolved human psychology and culturally transmitted systems.
Ultimately, we believe that many of the most pressing challenges facing modern societies—from political polarization and institutional distrust to global cooperation and collective action—can only be understood by studying how minds, cultures, and institutions co-evolve.
Commitment to Students
Students are central to the intellectual life of MINT Lab.
We view students as collaborators rather than assistants. Lab members participate in every stage of the research process, from theory development and study design to data analysis, scientific writing, and public communication. Through close mentorship and a structured collaborative environment, students develop the conceptual, methodological, and professional skills needed to become independent researchers.
Our goal is not only to train scientists, but to cultivate scholars capable of addressing some of humanity’s most fundamental questions about morality, cooperation, and social life.