Laurent Bègue is a professor of social psychology at the University of Grenoble and the director of the inter-university psychology laboratory Personality, Cognition and Social Change. He is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

How do we act? What do we think of others? How do we judge them? What meaning do we give the most banal of our daily actions? How do we justify them?
We spend a great deal of time judging others and their behaviour. How do we regard them, and ourselves? This book analyses the shape that morality takes in our minds, and its consequences in our lives and in our relations with others.
It plunges into the core of human nature in a thorough exploration of the more or less hidden mechanisms underlying the workings of the moral self, the apprenticeship of morality, how we relate to norms, whether (or not) we respect rules, the role of the emotions in making moral judgments, the foundations of beliefs.

• How can bad faith be explained? Why do we sometimes act in ways that we would deem unacceptable in others? How do we behave in relation to norms?

• This well-documented book offers a social-psychological approach that can explain some of the actions that constantly confront us.