DOI: 10.1177/1754073909354627 er.sagepub.com A Naturalist’s View of Pride

Although pride has been central to philosophical and religious discussions of emotion for thousands of years, it has largely been neglected by psychologists. However, in the past decade a growing body of psychological research on pride has emerged; new theory and findings suggest that pride is a psychologically important and evolutionarily adaptive emotion. In this article we review this accumulated body of research and argue for a naturalist account of pride, which presumes that pride emerged by way of natural selection. In this view, pride is prevalent in human life because of the functional and adaptive role it has played in the attainment, maintenance, and communication of social status throughout our evolutionary history. Keywords emotion, pride, self-conscious emotion, social status At first glance the emotion of pride appears to have been held in an almost uniformly negative regard throughout history. Perhaps most famously the biblical proverb holds that “pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall ” (16:18). This view was widespread among early Christian thinkers: both Augustine and Aquinas saw pride as the most fundamental of all sins (O’Donnell