One-shot anonymous unselfishness in economic games is commonly explained by social preferences, which assume that people care about the monetary pay-offs of others. However, during the last 10 years, research has shown that different types of unselfish behaviour, including cooperation, altruism, truth-telling, altruistic punishment and trustworthiness are in fact better explained by preferences for following one's own personal norms—internal standards about what is right or wrong in a given situation. Beyond better organizing various forms of unselfish behaviour, this moral preference hypothesis has recently also been used to increase charitable donations, simply by means of interventions that make the morality of an action salient. Here we review experimental and theoretical work dedicated to this rapidly growing field of research, and in doing so we outline mathematical foundations for moral preferences that can be used in future models to better understand selfless human actions and to adjust policies accordingly. These foundations can also be used by artificial intelligence to better navigate the complex landscape of human morality.

经济博弈中的一次性匿名无私通常由社会偏好来解释，社会偏好假设人们关心他人的金钱回报。然而，在过去的 10 年中，研究表明，不同类型的无私行为，包括合作、利他主义、说真话、利他主义惩罚和信任，实际上可以更好地解释为偏好遵循自己的个人规范——关于什么是自我的内部标准。在特定情况下是对还是错。除了更好地组织各种形式的无私行为之外，这种道德偏好假设最近也被用于增加慈善捐赠，只需通过干预措施使行为的道德性变得突出。在这里，我们回顾了致力于这一快速发展的研究领域的实验和理论工作，在此过程中，我们概述了道德偏好的数学基础，这些基础可用于未来的模型，以更好地理解无私的人类行为并相应地调整政策。这些基础也可以被人工智能用来更好地驾驭人类道德的复杂格局。