Abstract
We sometimes violate social norms in order to express our views and to trigger public debates. Many extant accounts of social norms don’t give us any insight into this phenomenon. Drawing on Cristina Bicchieri’s work, I am putting forward an empirical hypothesis that helps us to understand such norm violations. The hypothesis says, roughly, that we often adhere to norms because we are systematically blind to norm-violating options. I argue that this hypothesis is independently plausible and has interesting consequences. It implies, e.g., that some experimental paradigms for investigating social norms have hitherto unnoticed shortcomings.
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Notes
Hence the title of this paper. Note that my use of “unthinkable” in the title differs from Frankfurt’s (1988) use of the term. For Frankfurt, an action is unthinkable if the agent cannot bring herself to do it. For me, an option is unthinkable if there is a mechanism that excludes it from deliberation. I agree with Frankfurt, however, that facts about what is unthinkable partly constitute the practical and social identities of agents.
Some distinctions that are worth mentioning are irrelevant for my current purposes. Elster and Bicchieri, e.g., distinguish social norms from legal norms by pointing out that legal norms are codified and enforced by people who have a special duty to do so (see Elster 2009, p. 197; Bicchieri 2006, p. 8). It is also common to distinguish social norms from moral norms. Elster, e.g., holds that moral norms are sustained by feelings of guilt whereas social norms are sustained by feelings of shame (Elster 2009, p. 196).
A special feature of Bicchieri’s concept of a social norm is that it allows for so-called “pluralistic ignorance,” i.e., the possibility that a social norm for doing A exists while the majority (or even all) of the members of the population in which the norm exists do not disapprove of not doing A (but erroneously think that a sufficiently large subset of the population does disapprove of not doing A) (Bicchieri 2006, p. 14).
I don’t think that Benski’s example (a case of political activism in Israel) should be explained in terms of the OLM Hypothesis I shall present below. However, it illustrates the use of what she calls “breaching events” by social movements. OLMs are one mechanism among others that can be exploited in such “breaching events.” Compare also Judith Butler’s (1990) discussion of drag. The other side of the same coin is, I think, that OLMs can underlie structural explanations (see Haslanger 2015).
Paternotte and Grose (2013, pp. 581–584) have pointed out a related problem with traditional accounts of social norms, e.g., in the passage quoted above. However, Paternotte and Grose are not interested in the social effects that violations of norms as such might have.
Notice that this rule was a genuine norm and not a mere convention. For people expected men to wear short hair, i.e., what Bicchieri calls “normative expectations” were present in this case. The same holds for the example of the generic pronoun below.
On Bicchieri’s account this would mean that the parameter \(k_{i}\) in the agent’s utility function—which “represents a player’s sensitivity to the relevant norm” (Bicchieri 2006, p. 52)—is too small to keep the agent from defecting.
Smith et al. (2014) have offered an account of such phenomena in new social movements. They argue that agreement on new social norms can lead to new social identities.
There actually are practical advantages if one uses both pronouns as generic pronouns: certain ambiguities can be avoided. The sentence “For everyone who thinks that he is better than everyone else, there is someone who is better and he loves him,” e.g., is ambiguous in a way that the sentence “For everyone who thinks that he is better than everyone else, there is someone who is better and she loves him” is not.
They probably belong to what is sometimes called “System 1” (Kahneman 2011).
The OLM Hypothesis can contribute to an understanding of what it means that such norms structure the perception of our social environment. After all, OLMs change the options we are aware of, and these options typically involve particular interactions with our social surroundings.
After all, there are cases in which it is utterly implausible to think that people comply with a norm because they do not consider violating it. Practices like female genital cutting persist in some communities in Africa even after explicit efforts to change the relevant norms have been made and alternatives have been pointed out (Bicchieri and Mercier 2014). My hypothesis is not meant to apply to such cases. It is implausible to assume that the same mechanism underlies all cases of norm compliance (Andrighetto et al. 2014), and I am making a proposal about one such mechanism.
Perhaps similar ideas can also be found in work on bounded rationality. There are, however, also differences between OLMs and mechanisms that may underlie bounded rationality, such as satisficing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2010; Gigerenzer and Brighton 2009). Both, OLMs and satisficing, reduce computational complexity compared to cognitive mechanisms that compute, e.g., which of all possible options maximizes utility. On the other hand, OLMs reduce the number of options in the search space, whereas satisficing and most heuristics described within the bounded rationality framework introduce new rules for when to stop searching and for how to decide between the options in the search space.
The examples that are most often used are the decisions of firefighters, military commanders, and chess players.
Notice that I do not claim that the norm violations in Garfinkel’s study were social-expressive norm violations. Not all violations of OLM-sustained norms are social-expressive norm violations.
As already intimated, OLMs are probably more important in cases of internalized norms than in other cases. So the OLM Hypothesis should be primarily investigated with respect to such norms.
The second kind of situation should be unfamiliar to the agent in order to rule out that a mechanism like an OLM (that is not norm related) is also operative in this condition.
Göckeritz et al. (2014) argue that norms can spontaneously develop in the lab. One might doubt, however, that such norms can be internalized in the lab. And it seems plausible that only internalized norms can be sustained by OLMs.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
Since I don’t claim that OLMs are the only way in which social norms influence behavior, what I just said does not mean that traditional game-theoretic experiments cannot tell us anything interesting about social norms. We have learned a lot from such experiments.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this worry.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to James Woodward, Robert Brandom, Sally Haslanger, Rebekka Gersbach, and three anonymous referees for extremely helpful comments, debates and a lot of patience.
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Hlobil, U. Social norms and unthinkable options. Synthese 193, 2519–2537 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0863-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0863-5