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Explaining social norm compliance. A plea for neural representations

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Decision theorists tend to talk of ‘preferences’ instead of ‘desires.’ In what follows, ‘preference’ and ‘desire’ are used interchangeably, consistently with the accounts of norms I consider.

  2. Interestingly, some psychological theories seem to take into account some features of both representationalism and dispositionalism: e.g. Daniel Kahneman’s dual-process theory, and the distinction between systems 1 and system 2 (cf. Kahneman 2003). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer to draw my attention to this point.

  3. The following parallels an example in Haugeland (1998, p. 143).

  4. Different types of agents in Ray et al. (2009) account of the Trust Game were defined by the extent to which they were averse to unequal outcomes and by their level of strategic thinking.

  5. Recall that in their account beliefs about your cognitive and volitional profile influence my preferences about payoffs in the game. Interestingly, also in Bicchieri’s (2006) account of norm compliance preferences are dependent on beliefs. On her model, an agent’s preferences are conditional on his or her own beliefs regarding other people’s actions and expectations. So one prefers to follow a norm if he or she believes that certain conditions occur.

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Acknowledgments

I am sincerely grateful to Andy Clark, Dave Des Roches-Dueck, Angelica Kaufmann, Julian Kiverstein, Suilin Lavelle, Ray Debajyoti and Mark Sprevak for their generous feedback on previous versions of this paper, and/or for fun discussion of specific ideas in the paper. A special thank you to two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions. This work was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the priority program “New Frameworks of Rationality” (SPP 1516). The usual disclaimers about any error or mistake in the paper apply.

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    Matteo Colombo

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Colombo, M. Explaining social norm compliance. A plea for neural representations. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 217–238 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9296-0

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