Abstract: It is virtually impossible to cite an example of a species in which conspecifics do not interact in some way, yet most frameworks of phenotypic evolution ignore such interactions. To understand how traits evolve in a social context, we have to incorporate the interactions between individuals into models of evolutionary change. The talk will introduce the related concepts of indirect genetic effects (IGEs) and social selection and show how they emerge from a simple quantitative genetic approach to character evolution. IGEs have implications for a range of topics from the inheritance of reciprocity to parent-offspring coadaptation.