Abstract
Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the (sometimes mixed) explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms.
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Notes
Understood this way, moral psychology might be best understood as a form of applied psychology like the psychology of sport, or consumer behavior, which do not presume that their objects of study carve nature at its joints.
All references to “norms,” “normativity,” or “normative cognition” in this paper should be understood as referring to social norms, unless we specify otherwise.
There are some signs that certain norm theorists could be open to this kind of cognitive-level pluralism. For example, Theriault and colleagues distinguish between four different potential motivations for social conformity: informational influence, when a person copies others because they are perceived to be knowledgeable; reputation-seeking, when a person conforms in order to seek praise or avoid blame; social obligation, when a person feels obligated to conform to others’ expectations; and moral obligation, when a person conforms because they are motivated by independently held values or convictions (Theriault et al. 2021). Daniel Kelly has also distinguished between at least two different cognitive pathways for adopting a norm, which he calls internalization and avowal. Norm internalization occurs when a normative rule is adopted via automatic, functionally specific “System 1” processes that also cause us to become intrinsically motivated to conform to and enforce that rule. Norm avowal occurs when a norm is intentionally adopted via slow, effortful “System 2” processes, with the explicit goal of self-regulation (Kelly 2022).
One concern about tying the concept of normative regularities to patterns of behavioral conformity is that many familiar examples of social norms focus on behavioral prohibitions about what agents must not do rather that behavioral prescriptions about what they should do. Intuitively, members of a community not taking a certain action does not seem like the sort of thing that one could easily observe. Fortunately, there are ways around this obstacle. One way to infer whether a behavior of a certain type is prohibited is to look for signs that it elicits negative social maintenance. If every time a child writes with their left hand, an adult strikes them and forces them to use their right hand instead, that is a sign that writing with the left hand is prohibited. Notably, this approach would have limited use when it comes to studying strong behavioral prohibitions that are rarely or never violated. However, the presence of such normative prohibitions can be inferred by drawing comparisons between otherwise similar communities: if, for example, left-handedness is relatively common in some communities but is rare in others, that is a sign that left-handedness might be prohibited, even if one never observes it being punished. Together, evidence of negative social maintenance and comparisons across communities can enable us to detect normative prohibitions even in cases where these prohibitions are not explicitly avowed.
A complicating factor here is that how and when we punish others for norm violations is often shaped by other norms, values, and institutions. In practice, the negative social maintenance practice for one normative regularity may depend upon a whole network of other norms regulating whether or not punishment is permissible and who is permitted to carry it out.
Gossip can also function as a vector for the acquisition of social norms: negative gossip about a behavior can often serve as evidence that it is normatively prohibited (Westra 2021).
This view is analogous to Pinker and Jackendoff’s (2005) claim that the human language faculty is a complex system that evolved piecemeal but nevertheless has a single adaptive function (communication).
Of course, one need not accept Dennett’s position on the nature of the propositional attitudes in order to think of social norms as real patterns in this sense.
We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers from this journal, Jonathan Birch, Laura Danón, Simon Fitzpatrick, Cecilia Heyes, Joseph Jebari, William O’Shea, Stephen Stich, Jordan Theriault, and especially Daniel Kelly for their detailed comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We are also grateful to audiences at the Normative Animals conference, the 2022 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the ASENT Research Group at the London School of Economics, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, the Situated Cognition Research Group at Bochum University, the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Peking University, and to the participants of the Evolution of Normativity Workshop.
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Westra, E., Andrews, K. A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms. Biol Philos 37, 40 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09871-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09871-0