Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch a cognitive evolutionary approach for developing explanations of social change that is anchored on the psychological mechanisms underlying normative cognition and the transmission of social norms. We throw the relevant features of this approach into relief by comparing it with the self-fulfilling social expectations account developed by Bicchieri and colleagues. After describing both accounts, we argue that the two approaches are largely compatible, but that the cognitive evolutionary approach (...) is well- suited to encompass much of the social expectations view, whose focus on a narrow range of norms comes at the expense of the breadth the cognitive evolutionary approach can provide. (shrink)

This article shows that social norms are better explained as correlating devices for a correlated equilibrium of the underlying stage game, rather than Nash equilibria. Whereas the epistemological requirements for rational agents playing Nash equilibria are very stringent and usually implausible, the requirements for a correlated equilibrium amount to the existence of common priors, which we interpret as induced by the cultural system of the society in question. When the correlating device has perfect information, we need in addition only (...) to posit that individuals obey the social norm when it is costless to do so. When the correlating device has incomplete information, the operation of the social norm requires that individuals have a predisposition to follow the norm even when this is costly. The latter case explains why social norms are associated with other-regarding preferences and provides a basis for analyzing honesty and corruption. (shrink)

This paper argues that what is at stake in the debate over the nature of social normativity is the understanding of the significance of the tension between repetition and change. The first and second parts of the paper offer illustrations of the pervasiveness and tenacity of reinforcement, as well as the rarity, but also urgent need for, openness. The paper also argues that the most dominant reason as to why the above-mentioned tension has received little attention in the (...) literature is because of the focus on the analysis of the nature and status of orders, which are assumed or are posited to regulate or govern social life. The paper argues that when we resist reification of normative orders and see these orders, instead, as projections that enable human beings to achieve certain aims, we open the door to understanding the above-mentioned tension and its significance. Further, when we see normative orders as projections, we can also understand that normative requirements are all capable of being distinguished only in degree, and not in kind. In other words, what we ordinarily think of as the normal and the normative form a continuum ranging from, on the one hand, that which we would be surprised or enraged to see as being doubted or undermined, to, on the other hand, that which is the subject of much debate and disagreement. (shrink)

Background: According to Gelfand et al., COVID-19 infection and case mortality rates are closely connected to the strength of social norms: “Tighter” cultures that abide by strict social norms are more successful in combating the pandemic than “looser” cultures that are more permissive. However, countries with similar levels of cultural tightness exhibit big differences in mortality rates. We are investigating potential explanations for this fact. Using data from Germany and Japan—two “tight” countries with very different infection and mortality (...) rates—we examined how differences in socio-demographic and other determinants explain differences in individual preventive attitudes and behaviors. Methods: We compared preventive attitudes and behaviors in 2020 based on real-time representative survey data and used logit regression models to study how individual attitudes and behaviors are shaped by four sets of covariates: individual socio-demographics, health, personality, and regional-level controls. Employing Blinder-Oaxaca regression techniques, we quantified the extent to which differences in averages of the covariates between Japan and Germany explain the differences in the observed preventive attitudes and behaviors. Results: In Germany and Japan, similar proportions of the population supported mandatory vaccination, avoided travel, and avoided people with symptoms of a cold. In Germany, however, a significantly higher proportion washed their hands frequently and avoided crowds, physical contact, public transport, peak-hour shopping, and contact with the elderly. In Japan, a significantly higher proportion were willing to be vaccinated. We also show that attitudes and behaviors varied significantly more with covariates in Germany than in Japan. Differences in averages of the covariates contribute little to explaining the observed differences in preventive attitudes and behaviors between the two countries. Conclusion: Consistent with tightness-looseness theory, the populations of Japan and Germany responded similarly to the pandemic. The observed differences in infection and fatality rates therefore cannot be explained by differences in behavior The major difference in attitudes is the willingness to be vaccinated, which was much higher in Japan. Furthermore, the Japanese population behaved more uniformly across social groups than the German population. This difference in the degree of homogeneity has important implications for the effectiveness of policy measures during the pandemic. (shrink)

Tax compliance is a concern to governments around the world. Prior research (Alm, J. and I. Sanchez: 1995, KYKLOS 48, 3–19) has attributed unexplained inter-country differences in compliance rates to differences in social norms. Economics researchers studying tax compliance in the United States (U.S.) (see for example J. Andreoni et al.: 1998, Journal of Economic Literature 36, 818–860) have called for more attention to social (as opposed to economic) influences on tax compliance. In this study, we extend this (...) prior research by explicitly examining the role of social norms [Cialdini, R. and M. Trost: 1998, The Handbook of Social Psychology (Oxford University Press, New York)] on tax compliance in three different countries. We test our research hypotheses using a hypothetical compliance scenario, which was administered in Australia, Singapore, and the U.S. There were differences in compliance rates and social norms among the three countries. Factor analysis of the social norm questions identified three distinct social norm constructs. Two of these factors were significant in explaining tax compliance behavior. The first and most influential factor was taxpayers’ own personal moral beliefs, along with the beliefs of those close to them (e.g., friends and important others). The second significant factor represented societal views of proper behavior. We conclude that social norms help to explain tax compliance intentions and why tax compliance rates are higher than would be predicted by strictly economic models. (shrink)

An experimental paradigm that purports to test young children’s understanding of social norms is examined. The paradigm models norms on Searle’s notion of a constitutive rule. The experiments and the reasons provided for their design are discussed. It is argued that the experiments do not provide direct evidence about the development of social norms and that the concepts of a social norm and constitutive rule are distinct. The experimental data are re-interpreted, and suggestions for how to deal (...) with the present criticism are presented that do not require abandoning the paradigm as such. Then the conception of normativity that underlies the experimental paradigm is rejected and an alternative view is put forward. It is argued that normativity emerges from interaction and engagement, and that learning to comply with social norms involves understanding the distinction between their content, enforcement, and acceptance. As opposed to rule-based accounts that picture the development of an understanding of social norms as one-directional and based in enforcement, the present view emphasizes that normativity is situated, reciprocal, and interactive. (shrink)

We sometimes violate social norms in order to express our views and to trigger public debates. Many extant accounts of social norms don’t give us any insight into this phenomenon. Drawing on Cristina Bicchieri’s work, I am putting forward an empirical hypothesis that helps us to understand such norm violations. The hypothesis says, roughly, that we often adhere to norms because we are systematically blind to norm-violating options. I argue that this hypothesis is independently plausible and has interesting (...) consequences. It implies, e.g., that some experimental paradigms for investigating social norms have hitherto unnoticed shortcomings. (shrink)

Increasing women’s participation in intrahousehold decision-making has been linked with increased agricultural productivity and economic development. Existing studies focus on identifying the decision-maker and exploring factors affecting women’s participation, yet the context in which households make decisions is generally ignored. This paper narrows this gap by investigating perceptions of women's participation and the roles of social norms in agricultural decision-making. It specifically applies a fine-scale quantitative responses tool and constructs a women’s participation index to measure men’s and women’s perceptions (...) regarding women’s participation in decisions about 21 agricultural activities. The study further examines the correlation between social norms in these perceptions as measured by the WPI for 439 couples in West Java, Indonesia. We find that first, men and women have different perceptions about women's decision-making in agricultural activities, but the same perceptions of the types of activities in which women have the most and the least participation. Second, joint decisions come in various combinations but overall, the women’s role is smaller. Third, social norms influence spouses' perceptions of decision-making participation, which explains most of the variation of the WPI. These results suggest that rigorous consideration of social norms is required to understand intrahousehold decision-making. (shrink)

In a previous article I argued that tipping facilitates tax evasion, hurts employees’ financial security in the long run, and is a form of negative externality imposed by wealthy people on the rest of society. In this Article I try to understand the reasons for the greater popularity of the norm in the U.S. compared to other countries, suggesting it may be related to the U.S. cultural preference for linking redistribution with work requirements, relatively high income inequality and consumerism. To (...) that end, I further develop the negative externality argument suggested in the previous article by looking at trends in income inequality in the U.S. and by interpreting the global distribution of the norm through the prism of my inequality/negative externality argument. I then look at the tax treatment of tips in various countries in search of a pattern that supports the differences in social norms. (shrink)

Social change is slow and difficult. Social change for animals is formidably slow and difficult. Advocates and scholars alike have long tried to change attitudes and convince the public that eating animals is wrong. The topic of norms and social change for animals has been neglected, which explains in part the relative failure of the animal protection movement to secure robust support reflected in social and legal norms. Moreover, animal ethics has suffered from a disproportionate focus (...) on individual attitudes and behavior at the expense of collective behavior, social change, and empirical psychology. If what we want to change is behavior on a large scale, norms are important tools. This article reviews an account of social norms that provides insights into the possibility and limitations of social change for animals, approaching animal protection as a problem of reverse social engineering. It highlights avenues for future work from this neglected perspective. (shrink)

Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely (...) a result of children’s growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things. (shrink)

How should we understand the claim that people comply with social norms because they possess the right kinds of beliefs and preferences? I answer this question by considering two approaches to what it is to believe (and prefer), namely: representationalism and dispositionalism. I argue for a variety of representationalism, viz. neural representationalism. Neural representationalism is the conjunction of two claims. First, what it is essential to have beliefs and preferences is to have certain neural representations. Second, neural representations are (...) often necessary to adequately explain behaviour. After having canvassed one promising way to understand what neural representations could be, I argue that the appeal to beliefs and preferences in explanations of paradigmatic cases of norm compliance should be understood as an appeal to neural representations. (shrink)

A venerable tradition in philosophy sees significance in the fact that, from a subjective viewpoint, some rules seem to impress themselves upon us with a distinctive kind of authority or normative force: one feels their pull and is drawn to act in accordance with such rules unconditionally, and violations strike one as egregious. Though the first person experience of it can be mystifying, I believe this phenomenology is just one aspect of the operation of a psychological system crucial to morality. (...) Building on previous work, I’ll call this property of certain rules independent normativity. After describing that property, I situate it with respect to earlier work done on the so-called moral/conventional distinction, and suggest new questions it raises about morality and emotion. Sripada and Stich (2006) posit a model of the cognitive architecture underlying an important element of human rule cognition.1 Following them, I’ll call this the norm system, and the rules cognized by it social norms. One feature of this system is that it imputes those rules it processes with independent normativity. Understood this way, those rules that enjoy independent normativity do so not in virtue of any particular content, but because the mental representations that express them occupy a certain functional role in human minds (that I’ll call SN-functional role). (shrink)

This article explains how social norms can help to distinguish and understand a range of different kinds of social inequality and social hierarchy. My aim is to show how the literature on social norms can provide crucial resources to relational egalitarianism, which has made social equality and inequality into a central topic of contemporary normative political theorizing. The hope is that a more discriminating and detailed picture of different kinds of social inequality will help (...) relational egalitarians move beyond a discussion of the justice or injustice of social equality as a single general category. (shrink)

Public shaming plays an important role in upholding valuable social norms. But, under what conditions, if any, is it morally justifiable? Our aim in this paper is systemically to investigate the morality of public shaming, so as to provide an answer to this neglected question. We develop an overarching framework for assessing the justifiability of this practice, which shows that, while shaming can sometimes be morally justifiable, it very often is not. In turn, our framework highlights several reasons to (...) be concerned about the increasingly widespread phenomenon of online public shaming. (shrink)

Face-to-face meetings are often preferred over other forms of communication because meeting in person provides the “richest” way to communicate. Face-to-face meetings are so rich because many ways of communicating are available to support mutual understanding. With the progress of digitization and driven by the need to reduce personal contact during the global pandemic, many face-to-face work meetings have been shifted to videoconferences. With webcams turned on, video calls come closest to the richness of face-to-face meetings. However, webcam use often (...) remains voluntary, and some participants choose not to turn their cameras on. In order to find ways to support webcam use—when desired—we analyzed how social norms in groups affect the decision to activate a webcam in a specific meeting. Based on an online survey with N = 333 participants, we found that social norms are related to an individual’s decision to turn on the webcam, even when controlling for group size. If the number of participants with activated webcams in a university meeting increased by 25%, it was 5.92 times more likely that an individual decided to turn their webcam on, too. Furthermore, 81.84% of respondents indicated they would turn on their webcam if participants in a meeting were explicitly asked to do so. The results demonstrate a strong relation between social norms and the decision to activate a webcam in online meetings. They build a basis for enhancing webcam use and enable a greater richness of communication in online meetings. (shrink)

On Bicchieri's view, social norms most centrally involve a pattern of preferences among the members of a relevant population; according to Brennan, Eriksson, Goodin, and Southwood, social norms most centrally involve patterns of normative attitudes among the members of a given group. This paper argues, first, that social norms can require attitudes as well as behaviour, and, second, that the existence of such attitudinal social norms speaks in favour of the preference-based view and against the normative (...) attitudes-based view. (shrink)

This essay is an introduction to a special issue centered on Cecilia Heyes’ article ‘Rethinking Norm Psychology’. This target article criticizes nativist accounts of the psychological processes dedicated to social norms and offers an alternative account of norm psychology as a cognitive gadget that is culturally evolved and socially learned. The essay sketches out the conceptual landscape around that article and locates within it some of the main points of the 14 short commentaries. These discussions focus especially on trying (...) to clarify the central phenomena that a theory of norm psychology should seek to explain and examining Heyes model and its depiction of the interaction of implicit and explicit processes. They also consider Heyes' methodological proposal for how to best test hypotheses against each other and marshal evidence for claims about innateness. This introduction essay separates out social normativity from other forms of normativity. It also offers brief arguments that future work by norm psychologists should focus on further clarifying its relationship to a handful of nearby phenomena, including status psychology, social identity, and hierarchy; normalcy and the concept of normal, and the nuances of norm enforcement. (shrink)

In this study, we reconcile conflicting findings from the extant literature on the impact of tax system parameters on tax noncompliance. We argue that social norms play a role of heuristics facilitating tax payers’ response to the instrumental incentives posed by the systemic parameters, such as tax rate and penalties for evasion, and thus moderate the effect of those parameters on willingness to evade taxes. Relying on a unique survey experiment conducted in fourteen countries of Central-Eastern Europe, we demonstrate (...) two types of a conditioning effect of norms. First, the impact of tax rates on respondents’ propensity for tax evasion is moderated by the perceived norms of the society at large. In particular, an increasing tax rate lowers the probability of evasion as long as one views “most others” as honest taxpayers, which highlights the importance of equitability concerns for tax compliance decisions. In contrast, the impact of punishment is moderated by the perceived norms of one’s immediate reference group. Strong subjective compliance norms tend to effectively replace penalties as a mechanism discouraging tax evasion, suggesting that the deterrent effect of a penalty can be entirely suppressed when subjective norms are strong. These findings have important implications for the understanding of tax compliance decisions under different formal and informal regimes. (shrink)

Some behavioral economists argue that the honoring of social norms can be adequately modeled as the optimization of social utility functions in which the welfare of others appears as an explicit argument. This paper suggests that the large experimental claims made for social utility functions are premature at best, and that social norms are better studied as equilibrium selection devices that evolved for use in games that are seldom studied in economics laboratories.

In Morality and Socially Constructed Norms, Laura Valentini argues that moral obligations to respect social norms can be explained without invoking the concept of ‘joint commitment.’ Her resulting account is, in one important sense, individualistic, and therefore struggles to account for widely held intuitions about the normative significance of social norms. I argue that we can rescue the notion of joint commitment from Valentini’s objections, and incorporate it into a version of her account that preserves its insights.

Experimental economics offers new tools for the measurement of social norms. In this article, we argue that these advances have the potential to promote our understanding of human behavior in fundamental ways, by expanding our knowledge beyond what we learn by simply observing human behavior. We highlight how these advancements can inform not only economic and social theory, but also policymaking.We then describe and critically assess three approaches used in economics to measure social norms. We conclude our (...) overview with a list of recommendations to help empirical researchers choose among the different tools, depending on the nature and constraints of their research projects. (shrink)

Bicchieri (The grammar of society: The nature and dynamics of norms, 2006, xi) presents a formal analysis of norms that answers the questions of "when, how, and to what degree" norms affect human behavior in the play of games. The purpose of this paper is to apply a variation of the Bicchieri norms analysis to generate a model of norms-based play of the traditional deterrence game (Zagare and Kilgour, Int Stud Q 37: 1-27, 1993; Morrow, Game theory for political scientists, (...) 1994), the paradigmatic model of conflict initiation in International Relations. The deterrence game is modeled here as a sequential decision problem. As such, our analysis is an adaptation of Bicchieri's game-theoretic formalization of norms to what we will call the norms account of the game. We find that the standard account of the traditional deterrence game is a special case of the norms account of the game. We also show that the adaptation of Bicchieri's analysis of social norms yields new and interesting claims regarding when, how, and to what degree norms operate as a constraint on risk-related behavior in the traditional deterrence game. Moreover, we discuss how the results of the model provide testable propositions of relevance to the role of norms in international interactions. (shrink)

Networks and the World Wide Web seem to provide an answer to efficiently creating and disseminating knowledge resources. Knowledge, however, is ambiguous in character, and contains both explicit (information) and tacit dimensions - the latter being difficult to value as well as to transfer. Participant identity, commitment and behaviour within the network also affect the sharing of knowledge. Hence, existing laws and norms (including property rights) which have been established on the basis of discrete transactions and monetary value-oriented exchange may (...) not be adequate to deal with the whole spectrum of knowledge transfer. A model is needed to address transfer across a large heterogeneous network. We introduce the concept of sub-networks where tacit knowledge resides and argue that considering social norms underlying trust and other informal mechanisms provides a more suitable basis for understanding the exchange of tacit knowledge. Norm establishment is complicated by the fact that values differ across cultures; however, the social norms that underpin sub-networks can sustain knowledge transfer within them. The purpose of this conceptual article is to introduce the concept of sub-networks and to identify the sub-network/network relationship as an area in which it is necessary to look beyond property rights and raise the issue of norms. We believe that an analysis of the role of social norms in knowledge sub-networks and their interaction with global networks points to a key element in understanding networks and any emerging theory of network ethics in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Semi-structured interviews with university students in the UK and Japan, undertaken in 2009 and 2010, are analysed with respect to the revealed attitudes to privacy, self-revelation and revelation by/of others on SNS.

Even though standard economic theory traditionally ignored any motives that may drive incentivized social decision making except for the maximization of personal consumption utility, the idea that ‘preferences for fairness’ (following social norms) might have an economically tangible impact appeared relatively early. I trace the evolution of these ideas from the first experiments on bargaining to the tests of the hypothesis that pro-sociality in general is driven by the desire to adhere to social norms. I show how (...) a recent synthesis of economics approach with psychology, sociology, and evolutionary human biology can give rise to a mathematically rigorous, psychologically plausible, and falsifiable theory of social norms. Such a theory can predictwhich norms should emerge in each specific (social) context and is capable of organizing diverse observations in economics and other disciplines. It provides the first glimpse at how a unified theory of normative decision making might look like. (shrink)

We assert that audit quality can be improved to the extent that social norms for honesty and responsibility are activated in the auditor. To test this assertion, we use an experimental audit market setting found in the literature and manipulate factors expected to activate honesty and responsibility norms in the auditor. We find that auditor misreporting is reduced when the investor is another participant in the experiment rather than computer simulated, and thus, the interests of third-party investors are salient (...) to the auditor. We also find that auditor misreporting is reduced when the auditor is required to sign-off on the audit report, but only when the investor is another participant in the experiment. Consistent with our underlying theory, we find that pre-experimental measures of sensitivity to honesty and responsibility norms help explain the effects of our manipulated variables. Finally, we find that these measures of social norm sensitivity are associated with the moral judgment that auditor misreporting is unethical. Our study helps explain previous anomalous findings in the literature and answers the call in Blay et al. (J Bus Ethics 2017. doi:10.1007/s10551-016-3286-4) for empirical researchers to use social norm theory to develop stronger tests of moral reasoning in the market for auditing services. (shrink)

The first part of the article examines some recent studies on the early development of social norms that examine young children’s understanding of codified rule games. It is argued that the constitutive rules than define the games cannot be identified with social norms and therefore the studies provide limited evidence about socio-normative development. The second part reviews data on children’s play in natural settings that show that children do not understand norms as codified or rules of obligation, and (...) that the norms that guide social interaction are dynamic, situated, and heterogeneous. It is argued that normativity is intersubjective and negotiable and starts to develop in the first year, emerging as a practical skill that depends on participatory engagement. Three sources of compliance are discussed: emotional engagement, nonverbal agreement, and conversation. (shrink)

People with bad beliefs — roughly beliefs that conflict with those of the relevant experts and are maintained regardless of counter-evidence — are often cast as bad believers. Such beliefs are seen to be the result of, e.g., motivated or biased cognition and believers are judged to be epistemically irrational and blameworthy in holding them. Here I develop a novel framework to explain why people form bad beliefs. People with bad beliefs follow the social epistemic norms guiding how agents (...) are supposed to form and share beliefs within their respective communities. Beliefs go bad because these norms aren’t reliably knowledge-conducive. In other words, bad beliefs aren’t due to bad believers but due bad social epistemic norms. The framework also unifies different explanations of bad beliefs, is testable and provides distinct interventions to combat such beliefs. The framework also helps to capture the complex and often contextual normative landscape surrounding bad beliefs more adequately. On this picture, it’s primarily groups that are to be blamed for bad beliefs. I also suggest that some individuals will be blameless for forming their beliefs in line with their group’s norms, whereas others won’t be. And I draw attention to the factors that influence blameworthiness-judgements in these contexts. (shrink)

This article elaborates on foundational issues in the social sciences and their impact on the contemporary theory of belief revision. Recent work in the foundations of economics has focused on the role external social norms play in choice. Amartya Sen has argued in [Sen93] that the traditional rationalizability approach used in the theory of rational choice has serious problems accommodating the role of social norms. Sen's more recent work [Sen96, Sen97] proposes how one might represent social (...) norms in the theory of choice, and in a very recent article [BS07] Walter Bossert and Kotaro Suzumura develop Sen's proposal, offering an extension of the classical theory of choice that is capable of dealing with social norms. The first part of this article offers an alternative functional characterization of the extended notion of rationality employed by Bossert and Suzumura in [BS07]. This characterization, unlike the one offered in [BS07], represents a norm-sensitive notion of rationality in terms of a pure functional constraint unmediated by a notion of revealed preference (something that is crucial for the application developed in the second part of this article). This functional characterization is formulated for general domains (as is Bossert and Suzumura's characterization) and is therefore empirically more applicable than usual characterizations of rationality. Interestingly, the functional constraint we propose is a variant of a condition first entertained in [AGM85] by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson in the area of belief change. The second part of this article applies the theory developed in the first part to the realm of belief change. We first point out that social norms can be invoked to concoct counterexamples against some postulates of belief change (like postulate (*7)) that are necessary for belief change to be relational. These examples constitute the epistemological counterpart of Sen's counterexamples against condition α in rational choice (as a matter of fact, Rott has showed in [Rot01] that condition and postulate (*7) are mutually mappable). These examples are variants of examples Rott has recently presented in [Rot04]. One of our main goals in this article consists in applying the theory developed in the first part to develop a theory of norm-inclusive belief change that circumvents the counterexamples. We offer a new axiomatization for belief change and we furnish correspondence results relating constraints of rational choice to postulates of belief change. (shrink)

Some institutional investors are exposed to social norms and public scrutiny. Prior research indicates that these norm-constrained institutions engage in negative screening and invest less in firms operating in ‘sin’ industries. We examine whether social norms also motivate these institutions to engage in positive screening—where they invest more in firms with better corporate social responsibility performance—and CSR-related activism—where they promote improvements in the CSR of existing investees. We find that firms with superior CSR performance have greater ownership (...) by norm-constrained institutions, consistent with positive screening, and we use a natural experiment to establish causality. We also find that increases in the shareholdings of norm-constrained institutions are associated with subsequent improvements in CSR, consistent with activism. Further, we rule out an alternative explanation for our results where the positive screening and activism are ‘profit-driven’ rather than driven by social pressure. Thus, our results suggest that the influence of social norms on stock markets is more pervasive than documented in the prior literature. (shrink)

How should we undertand the role of norms—especially epistemic norms—governing assertive speech acts? Mitchell Green (2009) has argued that these norms play the role of handicaps in the technical sense from the animal signals literature. As handicaps, they then play a large role in explaining the reliability—and so the stability (the continued prevalence)—of assertive speech acts. But though norms of assertion conceived of as social norms do indeed play this stabilizing role, these norms are best understood as deterrents and (...) not as handicaps. This paper explains the stability problem for the maintenance of animal signals, and so human communication, for we are animals too, after all; the mechanics of the handicap principle; the role of deterrents and punishments as an alternative mechanism; and the role of social norms governing assertion for the case of human communication. (shrink)

HLA Hart tells us about how law would have emerged in a world of primary rules—informal, beneficial norms—by adjustments that the primary rules would naturally require; these adjustments would have introduced secondary rules for regulating the primary. But he does little to explain how the primary rules would themselves have emerged and, by most accounts, does not expand appropriately on the idea that the relevant players in his story would have taken an internal point of view, as he calls it, (...) on the rules involved. This article, presented as the Hart Memorial Lecture on 14 June 2018, argues that both problems can be resolved at once. Elaborating on Hart’s story with an account of how primary rules might have emerged, it also explains why those regularities would have attracted such a point of view. It argues that the emerging primary rules would have come to be perceived, internalised and ratified by all, and would even have been seen as rules to which each was personally committed. (shrink)

While the importance of social norms for shaping and transforming communities is uncontested, their nature and normativity are controversial. Most recent theorists take social norms to arise if members hold certain attitudes, such as expectations on others, perhaps along with certain behaviours. Yet attitudes do not create norms, let alone social norms or social normativity. Social norms are instead ‘made’: through a social process. Social norming processes are special communication processes, often (...) non-verbal and informal. We present different versions of a process-based account of social norms and social normativity. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, as processes represent social ‘acts’, just as laws and contracts arise through acts rather than mere attitudes, for instances acts of voting or signing. (shrink)

Theories of social norms frequently define social norms in terms of individuals’ beliefs and preferences, and so afford individual beliefs and preferences conceptual priority over social norms. I argue that this treatment of social norms is unsustainable. Taking Bicchieri’s theory as an exemplar of this approach, I argue, first, that Bicchieri’s framework bears important structural similarities with the command theory of law; and second, that Hart’s arguments against the command theory of law, suitably recast, reveal the (...) fundamental problems with Bicchieri’s framework. I then draw on Hart’s critique to develop and defend an alternative approach, arguing that we should conceive of social norms as the norms internal to a “socially sanctioned representational practice.” This approach makes social norms conceptually independent of individuals’ beliefs and preferences by locating them within social practices that transcend their individual participants, structuring the social landscape even before individuals form their own beliefs and preferences. (shrink)

Veissière and collaborators ground their account of culture and social norms in the free-energy principle, which postulates that the utility of an outcome is equivalent to its probability. This equivalence would mean that their account entails that complying with social norms has always adaptive value. But, this is false, because many social norms are obviously maladaptive.

High propensities to form coalitions and to negotiate and prevent conflict escalation may be found in monkeys as in great apes. However, there is no evidence that non-human primate communities intend to suppress individual power that grows too strong. Qualifying as protomoral those abilities needed to keep low the dominance gradient is not useful. When communication about social norms appeared in some hominids, it would not have been limited to sanctions against domination.

The paper presents a novel view of social norms that reflects the importance of different agent types, their specific motivations and roles. How one identifies with a role and behavioral options available to the agent is crucial for the sustainability of the social norms. The analysis of a simple case of social norm is suggested as a default model for analysis, and then the classification of subjects, enforcers, and audience is introduced. This triangular typology of agents is (...) extended by introducing a network of interlocking patterns underlying social behavior. Lastly, the paper describes two categories of transgressions based on misidentification. (shrink)

The emergence of social norms would have been dependent on the evolution of the cognitive capacity for mentalising to multiple orders of intentionality. Common knowledge is a related phenomenon that can solve coordination problems. That the same cognitive and social mechanisms should facilitate both peace and war is resonant with Girard's scapegoat hypothesis on the relationship between violence and religion.

The unwillingness of college students to use recycled water has become a key barrier to sewage recycling on campus, and it is critical to strengthen their inclination to do so. This paper used college students in Xi’an as a case study and adopted event-related potential technology to explore the effect of social norms on the willingness to use recycled water and the neural mechanism of cognitive processing. The results suggested the following: The existence of social norms might influence (...) college students’ willingness to use recycled water. When individuals’ willingness to use recycled water is lower than the social norm, there is a bigger feedback-related negative amplitude. College students pay more attention to social norms in groups with closer social distance. These findings can be used to provide a scientific basis for persuading the public to use recycled water from the perspective of the social norm to drive public acceptability. (shrink)

Honor systems are a cheap and simple way for marketing low-price goods. These sale systems are dependent on the honesty of customers and can only tolerate a certain share of free-riders. In an experimental field study, we investigate a case where honesty has almost disappeared, namely an honor system for the sale of newspapers on weekends. In the chosen urban study area, only a minority of customers comply with payment norms. In this difficult setting, we tested the use of eye (...) images and descriptive social norms as cues to improving payment morale over a period of 24 weeks. We find that interventions based on eye cues as well as normative appeals do not evoke a transition from low to high levels of honesty. However, our results suggest that such interventions might still have the potential to marginally increase mean payments and therefore be economically profitable for operators of large-scale honor systems. (shrink)

The problem area of distributive justice includes at its core questions about what ought to be owned, how it can be owned and who ought to own it. A fundamental assumption behind recent attempts to address these questions is that the power to shape the property institutions of a society lies entirely in that society's laws. This view, I argue, is mistaken. In this dissertation I provide an account of how property institutions are related to other social practices in (...) a society. A consequence of this account is that property law does not solely determine what property looks like in a society. ;The analysis begins with the observation of Enlightenment-era natural rights theorists that property is, first and foremost, a conventional social norm. I then turn to modern developments in game theory and social psychology to propose a novel account of how conventional social norms guide agents. On this account, a norm guides an agent by influencing their practical reasoning in one of two ways: either rationally, by generating a belief that behavior in those circumstances is required by that norm, or sub-rationally, by structuring the agent's practical reasoning, without the agent being aware of it, in such a way that ensures the formation of intentions to act in a manner required by the norm. This second form of norm guidance, which I call 'passive norm guidance', provides grounds for the claim that property norms can exist and function independently of recognition by the law. I go on to show how the independent existence of property norms can support a robust natural law account of property rights according to which property rights exist independent of recognition by the law. The dissertation ends by show how this account, while radical, is also consistent with the dominant Twentieth Century analytic jurisprudence accounts of property. (shrink)

Normativity is widely regarded as the ability to make evaluative judgments based on a shared system of social norms. When normativity is viewed through the cognitively demanding lens of human morality, however, the prospect of finding social norms innonhuman animals rapidly dwindles and common causal structures are overlooked. In this paper, I develop a biofunctionalist account of social normativity and examine its implications for how we ought to conceptualize, explain, and study social norms (...) in the wild. I propose that we think of social normative systems as behavior-regulatory power structures that resolve conflicts between nested levels of selection in favor of the higher level. I argue that the best case for social norms outside of humans is not in the animals one might expect, such as primates or other large-brained vertebrates, but rather in social insects. Finally, I engage with a number of potential objections to this unorthodox proposal. (shrink)

Janice Moulton's “The Adversary Method: A Philosophical Paradigm” articulated several criticisms of the popular idea of philosophy as adversarial debate. Moulton criticizes it on epistemic grounds, arguing that philosophy's overreliance on adversarial debate is to the detriment of its goals. Some, notably Trudy Govier, have argued in favor of at least a minimal adversariality, governed by norms of respectful argumentation. This paper suggests that Govier's faith in these norms is misplaced, because it neglects the social circumstances of the arguers. (...) While some authors have argued that politeness and aggression apply differently to those of different genders, this paper extends that analysis to social identities other than gender. In fact, given certain assumptions about the philosophy of language, engagement in polite adversarial debate may not even be possible for people occupying certain social locations. (shrink)

In Norms in the Wild, distinguished philosopher Cristina Bicchieri argues that when it comes to human behavior, social scientists place too much stress on rational deliberation. In fact, she says, many choices occur without much deliberation at all. Two people passing in a corridor automatically negotiate their shared space; cars at an intersection obey traffic signals; we choose clothing based on our instincts for what is considered appropriate. Bicchieri's theory of social norms accounts for these automatic components of (...) coordination, where individuals react automatically to cues that focus their attention on what the norm is in that situation. Social norms thus act as rules for making choices in a social world where people expect others -- often unconsciously -- to follow the same rule. Some norms enable seamless social co-operation, while others are less beneficial to human flourishing.Bicchieri is famous for her interdisciplinary work on game theory and most recently her work on social norms, and Norms in the Wild represents her latest challenge to many of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. Bicchieri's work has broad implications not only for understanding human behavior, but for changing it for better outcomes. People have a strongly conditioned preference for following social norms, but that also means that manipulating their expectations can cause major behavioral changes. Bicchieri has been working recently with UNICEF and other NGO's to explore the applicability of her views to issues of human rights around the world. Is it possible to change social expectations around forced marriage, genital mutilations, and public health practices like vaccinations and sanitation? If so, how? What tools might we use? This short book explores how social norms work, and how changing them - changing preferences, beliefs, and especially social expectations - can potentially improve lives all around the world. It will appeal to an unusually broad range of readers including philosophers, psychologists and others in behavioral sciences, and anyone involved in public policy or at NGOs. (shrink)

This chapter examines how epistemic norms could be social norms, with a reliance on work on the philosophy and social science of social norms from Bicchieri (on the one hand) and Brennan, Eriksson, Goodin and Southwood (on the other hand). We explain how the social ontology of social norms can help explain the rationality of epistemic cooperation, and how one might begin to model epistemic games.