Why Towns Conform
Imagine a group with a social norm against spitting on the sidewalk. If this group is very small, then everyone should know everyone well, and any one act of spitting will have only a small influence...
View ArticleStrictness Aids Hypocrisy
Long ago in traffic school the teacher asked us all how fast we’d gone over the speed limit. The lowest answer was five miles an hour – it was a black resident of East Palo Alto who had been driving...
View ArticleManners Show Status
A Post article, “The Reasons For Good Manners“, targeted at kids: Take your elbows off the table. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Look people in the eye when you speak to them. Write your thank-you...
View ArticleRich Happy Individualists
In the last week I found three top academic journal articles on how the key difference between societies today is whether they emphasize conformity to social rules/norms, or individual initiative and...
View ArticleWomen Enforce Norms
It seems women are more in the role of enforcing social norms: While there is ample evidence of a society-wide cooperation norm, it is not as clear who upholds this norm. In the present paper, we...
View ArticleOn Play Hell
Our activities split into work and play. And positive and negative extremes are described as heavens and hells. So there are four possible work-play extremes: work heaven, work hell, play heaven, and...
View ArticleSocial Norms Are Far
We see social norms as more relevant when predicting the average behavior of a group, relative to predicting an individual’s behavior: In judgments of morally relevant behaviors, forecasters estimated...
View ArticleWhat About The Future Matters?
The future of 2050 might be different in many ways if, for example, climate change were mitigated, abortion laws relaxed, marijuana legalized, or the power of different religious groups changed. Which...
View ArticleCareful Who You Call ‘Racist’
Imagine that you manage a restaurant, and suddenly during the evening shift a middle-aged woman stands up, points to another diner, and yells “Murderer!” She loudly appeals to everyone to help her...
View ArticleThe Robot Protocol
Talking with a professor of robotics, I noticed a nice approachable question at the intersection of social science, computer science, and futurism. Someday robots will mix with humans in public,...
View ArticleHail Humans
Humans developed a uniquely strong and flexible capacity for social norms (see Boehm). Because of this, the praise that humans most crave is an acknowledgment that we are principled. That is, that we...
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Automatic Norms
Some new ideas I want to explain start with a 2000 paper on Taboo Tradeoffs. (See also newer stuff.) So I’ll review that paper in this post, and then I’ll explain my new ideas in the next post. In...
View Article10 Implications of Automatic Norms
My last post observed that we seem to have a meta-norm that norm application should be automatic and obvious. We are to just know easily and surely which actions violate norms, without needing to...
View ArticleAutomatic Norms in Academia
In my career as a researcher and professor, I’ve come across many decisions where my intuition told me that some actions are prohibited by norms. I’ve usually just obeyed these intuitions, and assumed...
View ArticleAutomatic Norm Lessons
Pity the modern human who wants to be seen as a consistently good person who almost never breaks the rules. For our distant ancestors, this was a feasible goal. Today, not so much.To paraphrase my...
View Article#MeToo In A Star Is Born
The Me Too movement (or #MeToo movement), with many local and international alternative names, is a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault. #MeToo spread virally in October 2017 as a...
View ArticleWhy Weakly Enforced Rules?
While some argue that we should change our laws to open our borders, it is more common for pro-immigrant folks to argue for weaker enforcement of anti-immigration laws. They want fewer government...
View ArticleWhy Grievances Grow
We have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances...
View ArticleWho Complains How About Whom
We humans like to complain. And while we might pretend that the main purpose of our complaints is to help others adjust their behavior, more likely we like to collect successful complaints as a...
View ArticleHow Idealists Aid Cheaters
Humans have long used norms to great advantage to coordinate behavior. Each norm requires or prohibits certain behavior in certain situations, and the norm system requires that others who notice norm...
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