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Normative goals and the regulation of social behavior: The case of respect

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Abstract

The rational actor model has a long and successful history of explaining human motivation across several disciplinary fields, but its focus on material self-interest fails to explain the many courtesies that people extend to each other and the frequent sacrifices they make on a day-to-day basis. What promotes this pro-social behavior—in particular trust in other people? I argue that interpersonal trust is supported by normative goals, in that people trust others, even complete strangers, because of a sense of what they ought to do, by social rules and obligations they feel they must follow. In particular, people feel they must respect the character of the other person, constrained to act as though the other individual is an honorable human being, irrespective of what they may privately believe. I describe how respect underlies trust in economic games as well as pro-social behavior in other social settings. This focus on normative goals, such as respect, suggests that people do not always act in alignment with their expectations, regulate themselves in terms their actions rather than possible outcomes of those actions, and choose pro-social action not out of desire to benefit others as much as a simple acquiescence to situational demands.

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Correspondence to David Dunning.

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Dunning declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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This article is based on the author’s presidential address at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Motivation, Chicago, Illinois, May 2016. He warmly acknowledges the many contributions of his long-time collaborators, Detlef Fetchenhauer and Thomas Schlösser, to the work discussed.

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Dunning, D. Normative goals and the regulation of social behavior: The case of respect. Motiv Emot 41, 285–293 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9616-8

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