(rough summary of my academic research on social norms in winter term 2009; last term i was studying how analytical philosophy and game theory looks at norms; this term i am just reading Nietzsche)
"Rules govern all aspects of experience, what we are able to experience, and what not to experience, the operations we must and must not carry out, in order to arrive at a permitted picture of ourselves and others in the world. But a special situation exists if there is a rule against examining or questioning values: and beyond that, if there are rules against even being aware that such rules exist, including this last rule." (R.D. Laing, 1972)
The role and development of social norms and conventions has been a central area of study in sociology since the subject's beginnings, and in philosophy it goes back at least to David Hume (2000). The contribution of the game theory approach is more recent -- the ground was laid by David Lewis with his classic Convention (1969), followed by Ullman-Margalit's Emergence of Norms (1977). A second wave came with the application, taken over from biology, of evolutionary game theory models, pioneered particularly by Robert Axelrod (1987). These game theory approaches can bring powerful analytic tools to work on old questions -- but they also come with unhelpful baggage. In this essay I suggest, first, that we can advance on the "first wave" game theory models by jettisoning the neoclassical economists' conception of "omniscient" rational choice and looking at norms as decision rules within a framework of bounded or procedural rationality. Secondly, this framework provides the theoretical structure for looking at accounts of cultural evolution. But these evolutionary models will come to life when we drop assumptions taken over piecemeal from biology and pay attention to processes specific to cultural change.
norms as decision rules
In a field where authors often reinvent the terminology as they go, one useful anchoring point is Max Weber's (2002) account of "conventions", equivalent to what theorists nowadays more usually call "social norms". Weber defined a convention as a "customary rule" supported by "sanctions" applied by a social group as a whole, distinguishing a custom from a "law" where sanctions are wielded by a "specialised staff". Many accounts still include the key Weberian elements: a norm is, in some sense, a rule; norms are bound up with custom, tradition, habitual social practice; they are usually (if, at least for some writers, not necessarily) enforced with sanctions; some of the most forceful sanctions may be ones which are "internalised" or self-applied; norms are, for many writers, to be distinguished from formalised laws; and they carry some kind of "normative force" -- a perception of obligation, “oughtness”, or, perhaps, "legitimacy".
In this essay I won't deal with most of those points in depth. I focus here on the question of how and why norms change, or new norms arise. The core of the approach taken here is the idea that a norm is a rule for acting or making decisions. Actually much of what I will say will apply to such decision rules more generally, and I will leave a lot of the specifically normative features of norms uninvestigated. In fact, though I don't explore this point in depth, I tend to think that normativity is more a matter of degree than type -- little human behaviour has no relation at all with sanctioning, "oughtness", and "the norm".
Following Lewis (1969), it may be helpful to distinguish between rules and regularities. The notion of regularity is behavioural: a recurring action which agents take in relevantly similar situations. The notion of a rule goes beyond observed behaviour and towards explanation. An individual's behaviour may follow a certain regular pattern because she is following a rule -- the rule helps explain the regularity. However a regularity or pattern may have nothing to do with rule-following (for example, it may be a coincidence); while, conversely, a rule may exist even if it is not being followed.
While, as Lewis notes, the word "rule" picks out "an especially messy cluster concept", here I am using it in a narrowly descriptive sense: in a particular situation S, a rule R specifies a particular action (or a restricted set of actions) for actors to take. To say that actors "follow" or "conform to" the rule in this situation means that they perform the specified action (or one of the restricted set of actions).
Norms being rules goes a long way to explain why they have been so problematic for standard rational choice theory (RCT) accounts of social behaviour, in which actors are modelled as making decisions that maximise their expected utility. The problem, as posed by Edward McClennen (2004), is that: "either the rule gives the wrong result, in which case it is irrational to follow it; or it gives the right result, in which case guidance by the rule is irrelevant."
Rational choice theory supposes that in a given situation there is such a "right" decision which best achieves (probabilistically) the agent's preferences given her subjective beliefs, and that a rational agent will choose this "right" decision. RCT doesn't concern itself with the question of how the agent is able to identify the right decision, using what cognitive or other procedures -- these mechanisms are left within a "black box". Although some defenders have developed arguments as for why the model will yield meaningful results, at least on aggregate or as an approximation, the evidence that human decision-makers fail to meet the requirements of the theory continues to stack up.
In what Herbert Simon (1986) calls a "bounded rationality" or "procedural rationality" approach, no objectively or substantively "best" decision is defined. Rather, the procedurally rational person "goes about making his or her decisions in a way that is procedurally reasonable in the light of the available knowledge and means of computation". (p369). A definition of "rationality" (and conversely, irrationality) in such a theory requires an account of when a procedure is "reasonable" -- but I will slide over that question in this paper. My interest here is less in characterising the rationality (or otherwise) of decision-making than in pursuing the idea that people act by following procedures that they learn, pick up, adapt and develop in the course of repeated interactions.
To be more specific, the approach taken here largely follows that of Gigerenzer, Todd et al. (1999), whose basic idea is that human individuals use an assortment of heuristic principles to choose actions. We can think of these heuristics as tools in a decision making toolbox. Different tools will get taken out and applied depending on the situation: for example, some decisions call for lengthy processes of reflection and deliberation; but sometimes we need to make snap decisions using crude rules of thumb. Context thus becomes central to this approach.
Cristina Bicchieri (2006), although she stays within the RCT language of preference and utility functions, applies such a context/heuristic approach to the analysis of social norms. Individuals use contextual stimuli to categorise a new situation, drawing on an existing "memory store" of past encounters. Categorisation activates a cognitive schema of "beliefs, expectations, and behavioural rules" associated with the context. Bicchieri proposes that these "schemata" often take the form of scripts in which we cast ourselves and others in set roles. The roles in which we cast others come with associated behavioural and normative expectations.Our own roles come also with context-dependent "preferences"-- for example, the preference (or -- desire) to follow a particular norm or other behavioural rule, where the situation calls for it.
However, Bicchieri dilutes the procedural rationality approach in a dual theory of "deliberational" and "heuristic" decision-making. She identifies norms as "default rules" within heuristic decision-making processes; but she maintains that there is also a non-heuristic way in which people make decisions through a conscious "process of rational deliberation". Bicchieri thus maintains her ties with standard RCT, arguing that expected utility maximisation approximates, albeit "somewhat ideally" (p4), this deliberational decision-making which we apply in some types of decision situations.
A more fully "procedural" approach would make no such clear cut distinction between deliberational and heuristic decision "modes". Rather, we could think of a spectrum of more or less simple or intricate, quick or lengthy, rough or "careful" decision procedures. (Nor, I suggest, is conscious awareness a key distinguishing feature.) On this view, deliberational reasoning processes can be seen as schedules or programmes of linked or nested heuristics. For example, "take time to consider a range of options, and weigh up the pros and cons" is a heuristic decision principle. And there's no reason to think that normativity is confined only to more hasty less "deliberational" decision-making -- in fact we often reason, reflect, weigh up, ponder and anguish at length upon normative demands.
ultimata and scripts
This context/heuristics approach cuts through the problem that norms pose to the standard rational choice analysis. We can see this by focusing on a key example, the problem of the ultimatum game experiments.
Two people divide a sum of money (say, $10) in the following way: first, the Proposer suggests a split of the money; then the Responder can either accept the offer or reject it. If she accepts, the money is divided as proposed; if she rejects, neither player receives anything. Under standard game theory assumptions, and if we assume that both players value only money, a rational Proposer will offer the minimum amount (say, one cent) to the Responder; and a rational Responder will accept, as anything is better than nothing. In fact, players in experiments from Slovenia to Tokyo do anything but this. There are some interesting cultural differences in the results, providing material for economic anthropologists -- but what seems "universal" is that few people, anywhere, act "rationally" on standard game theory terms. The most common offer is a roughly equal split; and Responders commonly "punish" low offers with refusal.
Most commentators conclude that the players, rather than rationally pursuing economic self-interest, are instead following norms of "fair division". This is a particular puzzle for those rational choice theorists who hold tight to a "narrow" doctrine, close to neoclassical economic theory, in which individuals' utility functions incorporate only economically self-interested preferences. The RCT theorist can get round this problem by moving to a "broad" conception where players don't value money alone -- for example, they may have preferences for following fairness norms. This is the step taken by Bicchieri or, for example, by Philip Pettit's (1990) account in which rational individuals pursue "social acceptance" as well as "economic gain".
Perhaps the real challenge for any theory of human action is how to explain the diversity of social behaviour -- as Dan Hausman (2007) puts it, to help us understand “why people may be cutthroats at work, devoted parents at home, liberals at the voting booth, racists at the club, public spirited one moment, pious at another, principled before lunch, and utterly selfish afterwards.” There are some situations where people pursue material self-interest above all, and RCT models have (arguably) done well in economics when confined to "market" interactions. But can rational choice work when broadened beyond these particular contexts?
There are maybe two possible approaches open to broad rational choice theorists. The first, which we might read in Pettit, is to stick to the idea that agents have one unique utility function which applies in all these contexts, but make it one which encompasses a broader, more realistic, range of motivations and desires. The problem is then to reconcile apparently conflicting preferences (e.g., economic self-interested preferences with norm-following preferences) within one consistent preference set that holds throughout all the different situations in which individuals act. Alternatively, similar to Bicchieri, they might abandon the idea of a single preference set for a model in which agents have a range of different, possibly conflicting, contextualised preference sets. The problem is then to explain how or why these different preference sets come to obtain in given contexts. While I see the second route as more reasonable, one might think that it leeches much of the content or explanatory power from RCT, a theory based on the idea that humans follow consistent choice patterns.
It is not a big step from contextualised preferences to a fully procedural theory: we just drop the idea that there is a "best" decision for agents to take, even a contextualised or local "best". A rough answer to the ultimatum game "puzzle", taking the context/heuristic approach, is as follows. We can see the way (narrow) RCT theorists approach this situation as incorporating an implicit expectation that players follow a particular "script" -- call it the "market script" -- which mandates decision procedures aiming to maximise personal economic gain. But in reality most people categorise the situation quite differently, and follow instead a quite different "fair division" script.
Hobbesian emergence
This brings us, at last, to the focal question of this essay. Why do people follow the different scripts they follow, with different norms, different rules, in different situations? Once we give up the idea that there is a (rationality) standard of rightness for decisions, this becomes more clearly a question of contingency not teleology. Particular rule-following patterns have built up along particular historical or evolutionary paths of cultural development. What we are interested in here is how these patterns develop, how they change (and how we can intervene to help change them).
The game theory approach to norms often goes together with a certain way of thinking of their development -- or "emergence". David Lewis showed how a convention, as a salience solution for a coordination game, could arise in a situation where no convention yet existed. Similarly, Ullman-Margalit (1977) posed the question of how a norm can "emerge" from normlessness, and this schematic remains standard even in the more recent evolutionary game theory work on norms. Models begin with a kind of Hobbesian "state of nature", a scene in which self-interested rational actors are trapped in a collective action problem -- i.e., their rational decisions lead to an outcome that is worse than some other available "collectively beneficial" outcome. This preferable outcome can be reached if the game is "transformed" so that players come to follow a cooperative norm. The emergence question is how this switch can come about.
The context/heuristic approach poses the question otherwise. If rational self-interested behaviour is also another kind of rule-following action, then we are not looking for a jump from a rule-free state of nature to rule-following, but a shift from one kind of heuristic principle, or script, to another.
There might still be a question of how a rule with the particular features of norms ("oughtness", external and/or internalised sanctions) "emerges" from a situation in which only non-normative rules apply. For example, one approach, which goes back to Weber and indeed Hume, looks at how rules which become customary end up acquiring normative weight through a kind of inertial force.
However, we might want to be careful about making distinctions too sharp here either. Rather than think of norms as a distinct class of decision rules, we might say that there are rules carrying greater or lesser normativity. Specifically, normativity is still at work in areas that standard RCT theorists usually take to be the realm of pure substantive reasoning. The very idea of rational or consistent behaviour has normative implications; and is self-interest any less normative than fairness? For example, there are plenty of "oughtness" claims and approval/sanctioning behaviour in market interactions: sharp dealers get approval and status rewards, the gullible get laughed at, risk-lovers are alternately admired and shunned, etc. Much game theory work on norms assumes, explicitly or implicitly, that economic self-interest (however defined) is the "default" -- that is, while normativity is needed to support fairness, instrumental rationality is all that is needed in explaining market interactions. Yet few theorists make any attempt to ground this assumption. In fact it could be argued that it is contradicted by research in economic anthropology, economic history and institutional economics on the conventional and normative background to market behaviour.
evolutionary mechanisms
Here is a very simplified schema for looking at the development of norms within a context/heuristic approach. To start with, when an actor A categorises the situation she is in as type S, she follows a decision rule R. Later, the same actor A comes to follow a new rule R' in the same type of situations S. So what explains this shift from R to R'?
Evolutionary game theory models address this with tools adapted by biologists. In John Maynard Smith's (1982) basic model, animals are genetically programmed with fixed strategies which they play through their lifetimes; strategies are passed on (with the possibility of mutation) to offspring; thus strategies which foster survival and (asexual) reproduction are more likely to spread in future generations.
Robert Axelrod (1987) and Brian Skyrms (1996) simulate the evolution of fairness norms with straight analogues of Maynard Smith's model. Individuals are programmed with fixed strategies (decision rules) which they play in interactions; they are awarded payoffs which measure their "success"; after each round they die off and reproduce offspring in proportion to the payoffs; offspring inherit their parents' strategies, with the chance of random mutation. For example, Skyrms models dynamics of ultimatum game strategies to show that, under certain assumptions and with the right starting conditions, there is no reason to suppose that cultural evolution will favour "selfish" strategies even if money (which he takes to stand in for humans' biological fitness) is all that matters.
Maynard Smith advised that -- "If ... the idea of evolutionary stability is now to be reintroduced into sociology, it is crucial that this should be done only when a suitable mechanism of cultural heredity exists." On the face of it, there seems little reason to believe that cultural transmission mechanisms directly parallel biological ones. Individuals do not inherit fixed rules from biological (or "cultural") parents -- instead they mimic, learn, and adapt, from many others all around them all the time. A graph of cultural transmission networks does not have the linear structure of a genetic "family tree", but looks something more like a rhizome with links sprouting in all directions.
Indeed Axelrod and Skyrms themselves both note that cultural evolution works on its own lines. The use of the basic biological model is meant as a modelling abstraction which stands in for what Axelrod identifies as the general principle that: "what works well for a player is more likely to be used again while what turns out poorly is more likely to be discarded." In reality this "evolutionary principle" can work through different mechanisms, of which Axelrod lists three:
"It could be that the more effective individuals are more likely to survive and reproduce. This is true in biological systems and in some economic and political systems. A second interpretation is that the players learn by trial and error, keeping effective strategies and altering ones that turn out poorly. A third interpretation, and the one most congenial to the study of norms, is that the players observe each other, and those with poor performance tend to imitate the strategies of those they see doing better."
Are Axelrod and others justified in claiming that a model based on the first mechanism of heredity can account for mechanisms which involve learning and imitation? While I don't have an answer for that question here, I suggest that the claim calls for more than an assumption.
stability and change
The question of how a new norm develops is the flipside of the question: how does an existing norm stay in place? There is a full literature on mechanisms that stabilise and fix normative rules, which I can barely skim here. Many writers link normative rule-following to "conformist" psychological mechanisms. There are lots of issues here: do humans have innate propensities to seek acceptance from their peers, to follow and learn what is "commonly done"? How important are different kinds of social sanctions and "meta-norms" in keeping established norm in place? What are the mechanisms by which sanctions become "internalised" in individual conscience (and "bad conscience")?
Without digging in to these questions, we can say: when a norm has become established, it is embedded in a system of values, assumptions and expectations. A decision rule which is an established norm for a group thus has, to say the least, a force of "inertia" on its side, which a new norm will have to overcome if it is to "take over".
But before a norm gets to that stage, first of all it has to appear as a new mutation or innovation. There are various just-so stories about how innovations get going. One obvious approach is to look at transmission via contact between groups. For example, Boyd and Richerson (2002) have a model in which innovations spread from out-groups: members of a group (e.g., a "clan"), while subject to conformist normative pressure from their own, have an eye on the behaviour of members of neighbouring groups; if some members observe that counterparts in the other group do better using a different rule, they may start to switch. Or Axelrod, for example, suggests that innovators may be particularly powerful or prestigious group members who are less needy of approval or less vulnerable to sanctions. This is one way in which power enters into the shaping of norms, as these individuals are likely to innovate rules that serve to maintain their status.
Following "innovation", a new contender norm has to go through what marketing gurus call an "early adopter" stage in which it is initially picked up by just a few individuals in the group before, if it is successful, building up a momentum or "critical mass" of support and supplants the existing norm. In the initial phase the heretical new rule is working against the norm: it therefore has to have some strong intrinsic attraction for new adopters.
Following Axelrod and also Boyd and Richerson (1995), I will focus on how what the latter call a principle or heuristic of "imitate the successful" can play this role. Supposing that some innovator begins acting differently from the norm, some other group members may begin to see that the innovation brings them "greater success" than the majority. This extra "success premium" may be noticeable enough to outweigh the force of normativity for at least some individuals.
local success
Moving from inheritance to imitation could be a necessary step in moving theory of norm development away from biology and towards social realism. But there is another big step still to go. What here is the measure of "success" or effectiveness that leads actors to switch behaviour? Again borrowing from biological models, writers standardly work on the assumption that there is a single, extrinsic and independent criterion to play this role. Again, this is far from true to the processes of cultural evolution.
Biological evolution has such a simple success criterion -- an effective strategy is one that increases the reproductive fitness of its hosts. But as Daniel Dennett (1995) writes, the reproductive success of cultural replicators ("memes") is only very loosely tied to their ability to keep humans' physical bodies alive -- witness the success of celibate priests or suicidal poets as cultural incubators. More generally, what matters is the ability of new ideas and behaviours to fit, as Dennett puts it, with "whatever it is we hold dear". But then the standard for "success" is not an extrinsic measure but itself a construction of ideas, beliefs, practices, expectations. As Maynard Smith notes, in cultural evolution "the criteria of success are themselves to some degree culturally determined." As such, cultural valuation criteria are not fixed, but also subject to cumulative evolution.
Back to our simple market vs. fairness example, imagine a mixed population in which, when a situation of type Su occurs, some individuals habitually follow rule Rm, and others Rf. Situation Su is an ultimatum game-style division problem; rule Rm is a "market" principle -- offer the minimum amount, and accept any non-zero offer; rule Rf is a "fair division" rule -- offer an equal split, and refuse offers that depart too far from equality.
We can introduce a simple assessment and switching procedure: after each turn, players give a score to their own performance in the previous round, and also to the performances of their neighbours, and compare. Change follows Axelrod's mechanism: maybe after assessing over a number of rounds, a player will decide to switch to the strategy of a more successful neighbour. In general terms, we might model this by saying that player i uses a valuation heuristic Viu to assess or score the outcomes of interactions of this kind.
One simple valuation scoring principle could be: add up the money accumulated over a given number of terms. We can read this as the measure implicit in Skyrms' models. But there is no reason a priori to suppose that money payoffs are the only inputs into the score. For example, players may intrinsically value their actions themselves (whether they follow Rf or Rm, etc.). They may also value how others view (approve or disapprove of) their actions. If we think that normativity shapes the motivation for actions it seems quite intuitive that it is also involved in the assessment of those actions and their outcomes afterwards.
There is no reason a priori to assume that valuation principles are the same for all individuals: some people value money more, some are more conformist, etc. Nor to think that an individual always applies the same valuation standards. Having broken with the standard RCT idea that actions are motivated by a unique cross-contextual set of preferences, there is no more reason to assume that actors operate one fundamental ordering for assessing outcomes. In fact, it seems more likely that the way actors value outcomes (V) is linked to their rule-following choices (R): decision rules and outcome values are two connected facets of the scripts actors follow in decision contexts.
holistic shifts
If we move away from a single fixed success standard, have we lost tractability on understanding the dynamics of cultural evolution? Perhaps this approach might make it harder to construct neat computer simulations or mathematical models. However, it fits quite nicely with some other philosophically established ways of thinking about change processes. I propose that we think of cultural evolution here along the lines of processes of shift or revision in holistic systems of propositional attitudes.
For example, shifts in cultural behaviour can be seen as analogous to the revision of beliefs on a coherentist theory such as that advanced by Donald Davidson (1986). Indeed, it is more than a question of analogy -- as we can in fact retell the story of normative assessment outlined above in terms of belief revision.
To do this, we need to make one Davidson-style rationality-attributing step. The move is to say that an actor follows a rule R in a situation of type S if and only if she believes that doing so is the best choice in such a situation. Suppose that, after the event, she then assesses the outcome with the benefit of new evidence which suggests to her that, in fact, there is a better choice R' for situations of this type. This new evidence could involve, for example, the observation of another individual following R' and doing better. This new evidence causes her to revise her belief, so that she now believes that R' is the best choice.
Davidson explains his coherentism as follows: “what distinguishes a coherence theory is simply the claim that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief. Its partisan rejects as unintelligible the request for a ground or source of justification of another ilk.”(p310). More particularly, Davidson’s coherence theory has a holistic form: it is not that certain identifiable foundational beliefs “serve as the basis for the rest”; but that “there is a presumption in favour of the truth of a belief that coheres with a significant mass of belief.” That is, the holding (or adopting) of a particular belief is justified by its coherence with the “web” of beliefs as a whole.
Davidson’s position is thus that we have no direct access to circumstances in the “external world” to justify beliefs – even though these external circumstances are causes of beliefs. Applying this principle to our discussion: an actor observes herself and others applying different decision rules R and R’, and observes different resulting outcomes. These observations (or, maybe better, these observed events) cause her to form new beliefs, such as the belief that R’ is a better rule than R. Assuming that this belief is in fact justified (is rationally formed), it is justified because it coheres with a “significant mass” of her other beliefs. Including both existing beliefs (e.g., longstanding “principles” for evaluating action) and other newly formed beliefs (e.g., beliefs formed in response to observation of recent actions.)
On this approach, can we make sense of the idea that an actor forms (justified) new beliefs in line with a fixed valuation standard tied to her biology? Yes, so long as we don’t try and import some mechanism which bypasses coherentist justification. That is, so long as we don’t imagine that the actor can directly assess the “success” of an action against some biological standard accessible independently of belief (that would make some kind of biological “insight” play the part that sense-data are usually called on to play in the verificationist positions Davidson is attacking). Rather, any biological standard must operate indirectly through causal mechanisms which shape the “significant mass” of beliefs that bear on valuation of action.
to microsociology
Gabriel Tarde (1899) once outlined a plan to make "sociology a truly experimental science" by having between twenty and fifty sociologists eschew "vague generalities" and devote themselves to detailed local studies of "minute transformations" -- "for instance, it might first be asked, by whom and how the custom was originally introduced and generalised, among the peasants of certain rural districts in southern France, of not saluting the well-to-do proprietors of their neighbourhood." Such work couldn't fail to identify "most important truths" about the processes of social change.
While not a Tardean sociologist, I'll give a minute example of my own to illustrate some of the points made in this essay. Recently at the protests at the COP 15 summit in Copenhagen I was part of a process of shifting a decision rule for a group of a few thousand people. After a few days of having demos scattered and destroyed by police, a comrade of mine from Argentina suggested a new tactic which she knew well from demonstrations there. Rather than march in a loose group as usual, we would form tight lines along the sides of the march, linked arm in arm in human chains, to stop the police breaking through the line of march. Following a meeting in advance of the demo, a committed group of us, early adopters, took on the work of promoting the tactic against the norm. In the demo itself a critical mass of imitators grew, and by the end conformist and normative effects had also played their part in spreading the behaviour until it successfully took over the group.
We started the new tactic because we believed it would be more effective. Effective for what? Different people there might well evaluate success very differently: for some, the important thing is safety, for others, the noise made or attention gained, or acting non-violently -- or violently. At least in my conscious thinking, I was quite focused on the objective of reaching the target destination without allowing the police to arrest anyone on the way. Many beliefs were involved in my evaluation: more general beliefs about what the aims of a demonstration should be; about the purpose of this demonstration in particular, and how much I was prepared to do to support it; beliefs about how demonstration tactics work, about why the previous days' demos had failed, about likely police responses, etc. With work, maybe I could trace many of these beliefs through the personal cumulative evolution of my history as an activist, and my personal history more generally.
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Eai Dalgun como vc tá ?Mandei um email pra vc ,mas não sei se vc recebeu pq mudou o seu endereço certo ?
Gostei da foto ai da minha antiga pintura ... é muito esculacho nessa vida !
Forte abraço camarada e até logo.
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