The Psychology of Norms (Part 4): Research Questions

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This post is part of my series How Society Works. For an index, see here.

I am currently working my way through an article by Sripada and Stich entitled "A Framework for the Psychology of Norms". No prizes for guessing what it is about.

In the first two parts I reviewed some of the data about normative behaviour. In Part 3, I presented Sripada and Stich's model for explaining the psychology of norms, and introduced some of the questions that should guide future research in this area.

In this final part I continue to look at these future research questions. Focusing in particular on the role of the emotions, explicit reasoning and cognitive biases in normative psychology.

1. The Emotions
Philosophical iconoclast David Hume once argued that the emotions had a significant role to play in normative judgement. Sripada and Stich think there is good evidence to suggest that the emotions play a part in generating punitive motivations.

Indeed, research in this area suggests that three phenomena are closely linked: (i) norm-violation; (ii) the experience of emotions such as contempt and disgust; and (iii) the desire to punish the elicitor of the emotion. (Sripada and Stich review some studies by Johnathan Haidt, Joshua Greene and others in support of this).

There is also some speculation to the effect that emotions play an important role in generating compliance motivations. However, Sripada and Stich note a lack of compelling evidence to support this conjecture.

These speculations about the role of the emotions necessitate some additions to the box-and-arrow model presented in Part 3. The arrows with the dotted lines indicate hypothetical links, the solid lines indicate links for which there is good evidence.

2. Explicit-Reasoning
An important question about normative psychology concerns the role of explicit reasoning in normative judgement. The classic Kohlbergian position maintains that people pass through a number of stages in moral development. The later stages of this development involve detached moral reasoning.

In this detached moral reasoning-stage, Kohlberg stresses the importance of "ideal perspective-taking". This refers to our ability to abstract away from personal circumstances to discover general normative principles. This is the type of thing that Rawls was trying to achieve with his original position and the veil of ignorance.

The actual role that detached moral reasoning plays in normative judgement and behaviour is unclear. Sripada and Stich think it is likely that detached reasoning is separate from the mechanism they have been outlining to this point. They argue that this would explain why rational awareness and revision of moral principles is often superficial and ineffective.

Studies by Jonathan Haidt support this contention. Using a technique called moral dumbfounding, Haidt presents subjects with scenarios that elicit strong moral disapproval despite not contravening rational moral principles.

This suggests yet another revision to the model under discussion.

3. Biases and Constraints

The final set of questions for future research relates to the role of biases and constraints in normative acquisition. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that biases feature in other psychological processes but does this carry over?

Sripada and Stich recommend that we begin with the Pac-man Hypothesis. This hypothesis maintains that people can acquire any and all types of norm. We then consider all the ways in which the Pac-man Hypothesis could be wrong.

The first way in which it could be wrong is if at least some norms are innate. This might be true if there were some norms that were shared by all cultures. However, this does not appear to be true: norms do cluster around common themes but there is wide variation and some exceptions.

The second way in which it could be wrong is if moral judgement is constrained by a set of innate principles and parameters. This is exactly what Marc Hauser argues.

The third and final way in which it could be wrong is if some norms are more cognitively attractive or if certain situations are more conducive to moral learning. For example, proponents of gene-culture coevolution, such as Boyd and Richerson, argue that we more readily acquire norms from certain individuals due to a suite of biases:

• Prestige Bias: we emulate those who are more prestigious.
• Age bias: we emulate those who are slightly older.
• Gender bias: we emulate those who are of the same gender.
• Conformity bias: we try to fit in.

There is some evidence for age and gender biases, and lots of evidence for prestige and conformity biases.

That brings us to the end of Sripada and Stich's article.

The Psychology of Norms (Part 3): Psychological Architecture

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This post is part of my series on How Society Works. For an index, see here.

I am currently working my way through an article by Sripada and Stich entitled "A Framework for the Psychology of Norms". The goal of the paper is to provide a framework for research into the cognitive underpinnings of normative behaviour.

In part 1 we reviewed some social level facts about norms. In part 2 we reviewed some individual level facts about norms. In this part we will look at Sripada and Stich's proposed model for the psychological architecture that supports these facts.

The model presented here is described by the authors as a "first pass". They add elements to it later in the article as they consider some open questions for future research. I'll introduce some of those questions at the end of this post.


1. The Psychological Model
The authors argues for a psychological model with two major mechanisms: (a) a norm-acquisition mechanism; and (b) a norm-implementation mechanism.

The norm-acquisition mechanism helps us to pick up on external behavioural cues in our cultural environment. From these cues it infers that a particular set of norms are in existence. The acquisition-mechanism starts to work at an early age and is involuntary in nature.

The implementation-mechanism maintains a database of norms and generates a set of intrinsic motivations to comply with those norms. It may also play a role in detecting norm-violation. More on this later.

The basic model is illustrated in box-and-arrow fashion below.

The authors argue that this model helps to explain the data reviewed earlier in the article, makes substantive claims about innateness, and provides a framework within which future research questions can be pursued.

2. Some Open Questions
In the remainder of the article, Sripada and Stich review some of these questions. I will look at the first three sets of questions here, leaving the remainder for Part 4 of this series.

a. Morality and Normative Psychology
One big set of questions relate to how moral norms are differentiated, if at all, from other norms. There is some evidence suggesting that people process and interpret moral norms in a distinctive way. This suggests that moral norms might constitute a distinct subset within the norm-database or even have their own unique, uncontaminated psychological system.

The authors speculate that since this question overlaps with metaphysics and semantics (metaethics) it is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.

b. Proximal Cues
The next set of questions relates to the proximal cues that bring about norms acquisition. It could be that they are acquired in response to displays of punishment, but that seems unlikely given that children seem to acquire norms without exposure to such displays.

The psychologist James Blair suggested that norms are acquired when a parent's "sad faces" are paired with specific actions by a child. This was well-criticised by the philosopher Shaun Nichols.

It could also be that norms are at least partially acquired in response to verbal instructions.

c. Norm-Storage
The third set of questions relates to the storage of norms in the database. This touches on some long-standing debates in the philosophy of mind.

The classic position, associated with the work of Jerry Fodor, is that norms (like other mental concepts) are stored in sentence-like structures in the brain.

There are, however, a number of alternatives to this. According to exemplar theory, a cluster of cases that exemplify a norm are stored. When confronted with a normative decision, a person will search their database of exemplars and use similarity judgements to figure out what to do in the present context.

A question arises as to whether or not the entire database of norms is searched whenever a decision is made. This is unlikely. Recent cognitive and emotional history is apt to make certain exemplars more readily available to decision-making. Stich is himself a fan of this account.

Okay, that's it for Part 3. In Part 4 we will look at some additional research questions on the role of the emotions, explicit reasoning and cognitive biases in normative behaviour.

The Psychology of Norms (Part 2): Individual-Level Facts

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This post is part of my series on How Society Works. For an index, see here.

I am currently looking at an article by Sripada and Stich entitled "A Framework for the Psychology of Norms". The article does exactly what it says on the tin: it provides a framework for investigating the psychology of norms.

In Part 1, I covered the preliminary account of norms and listed some social-level facts about them. To review, norms are principles and rules determining appropriate conduct; they are a cultural universal; they cluster around common themes but have variable content; and there are almost always exceptions to the common themes.

In this part, we will look at some individual-level facts about norms. In other words, we will look at how it is that we become norm-following agents.


1. Norm Acquisition
The most obvious and most evidentially well-supported fact is that people, of all cultures and heritages, seem to acquire norms in a reliable and predictable fashion. Indeed, acquisition occurs relatively early in life. Several studies suggest that children have knowledge of normative rules between the ages of 3-5.

A major cross-cultural study by Henrich et al* focused on norms of cooperation and fairness. It was found that while these norms varied in their content, that content was relatively fixed in people's minds by the age of nine.



2. Motivational Effects
It is very clear that the acquisition of norms has a powerful effect on people's motivations. Classic economic rationality would suggest that people are only motivated to follow norms if there is some clear benefit to themselves. We would call this instrumental rationality.

Several lines of evidence suggest that people follow norms for intrinsic reasons. In other words, people are disposed to follow norms even when there is no obvious personal benefit from doing so. Despite this, it would be wrong to say that instrumental rationality is never a factor: human motivation is complex and it is possible that people act for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons as roughly the same time.

One crucial feature of norms is that they tend to encourage people to take an impartial view of their actions. By abstracting away from personal circumstances, norms try to force upon us unselfish modes of reasoning. David Hume was fond of making this point.

There are several lines of evidence supporting the intrinsic motivation hypothesis. Here is a sampling:

• Anthropology and sociology suggest that people internalise norms, i.e. they display a highly reliable lifelong pattern of compliance that is not dependent on overt coercion.
• Robert Frank, an economist, argues that several everyday behaviours, such as tipping at restaurants and returning lost property, are not plausible on the hypothesis of instrumental rationality.
• Daniel Batson's studies of helping behaviour suggest that people are motivated to secure the happiness of others as an end in itself and not merely as a means to their own happiness.
• Experimental economics has found that people follow fairness norms in one-off prisoners' dilemma-style cases. This is true even when they are told that the encounter will be anonymous.

3. Punishment
Perhaps the most convincing evidence for people's willingness to follow norms irrespective of the impact on personal or societal welfare comes from studies of the motivation to punish.

It is found that people are innate retributivists. They have a strong non-consequentialist desire to punish people who violate norms.

There are some complexities to take note of. First, motivations to punish do not always translate into behaviours, they can be suppressed or overridden by other concerns. Second, not every norm has a punishment associated with it.

The evidence supporting the intrinsic motivation to punish is multifarious. Here is a sample:

• Anthropological and sociological literature suggests that punitive emotions and punitive sanctions are common to all societies.
• Experimental economics has found that people will punish norm-violators even when it is costly to do so. For example, in public goods games (where the norm would be to pay into a common investment fund) people are willing to spend extra money to punish those who do not pay into the common investment fund.
• Other psychology experiments have found that mere observers are willing to punish people for norm-violation. This would seem to be a clear violation of self-regarding norm-compliance.

The results from experimental economics have been widely replicated, which suggests that the findings are robust.

Finally, it is worth noting that developmental psychologists have found that children systematically exhibit punitive attitudes towards those who violate rules without being taught to exhibit these attitudes. This might lend some support to those who see moral learning as analogous to language learning.

To conclude, human beings seem to have some innate cognitive structures that predispose them to the acquisition of norms. Once they acquire these norms, they seem to follow them in a predominantly intrinsic manner.

In the next part we will look at the hypothetical cognitive structures that might be responsible for all of this.

* Henrich, Boyd, Bowles, Camerer, Fehr and Gintis Foundations of Human Sociality (Oxford, University Press, 2001).

The Psychology of Norms (Part 1): Social-Level Facts

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This post is part of my series on How Society Works. For an index, see here.

I am going to kick things off by looking at the following article:

Chandra Sekhar Sripada & Stephen Stich "A Framework for the Psychology of Norms" in Carruthers, Laurence and Stich The Innate Mind (Vol. 2) Culture and Cognition (OUP, 2007).

Let's get straight to it.


1. Why do we need a framework?
Sripada and Stich begin their article by noting the importance of norms to the study of human sociality. Norms make social life possible, and they are frequently mentioned in the psychological literature. Nonetheless, there has been little systematic attention paid to norms in cognitive science. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic framework for the future investigation of normative systems.

The article is divided into five main sections. The first section offers a preliminary account of what a norm is; the second section sets out some social-level facts about norms; the third section sets out some individual-level facts about norms; the fourth section sketches the psychological framework that the authors promised; and the fifth section highlights some key questions for future research.

In this post we will cover sections 1 and 2 of the article.


2. What is a Norm?
A norm, according to Sripada and Stich, is a rule or principle that specifies which actions are required, permitted or forbidden. According to this definition, a norm does not owe its existence to any particular legal or social institution. Norms can and often do exist without institutional support.

Part of the reason for this has to do with relatively fixed psychological traits that we all seem to share. The picture is roughly the following:

• People pursue norms as ultimate ends, not merely as instrumental ends (although they can do this as well).
• Norm violation automatically engenders punitive attitudes like anger, condemnation and blame. These attitudes sometimes, but not always, lead to punitive behaviour.

These psychological traits seem to make normative systems self-sustaining. Think "invisible hand of the market" and you are on the right track. 

3. Social-Level Facts

With the preliminary account of norms under the belts, Sripada and Stich proceed to identify some social-level facts about norms. There are three of them.

The first fact is that norms are a cultural universal. Norms, and sanctions for norms are found in all societies and they govern practically all activities within a society. This suggests that there might be an innate basis for the acquisition and implementation of norms.

Although norms are a cultural universal, they display variable content. In other words, different acts are permitted or outlawed to different degrees, in different societies.

The variability is not indefinite. Indeed, certain types of norm pop up over-and-over again in the ethnographic literature. Sripada and Stich suggest the following as exemplars of this trend:

• Outlawing of incest and other restrictions on sexual activity.
• Outlawing of physical harm and killing.
• Some type of sharing (or equality) norm.

But within these general categories there is considerable variation.

Take the example of incest norms. Sripada and Stich note that every society has incest taboos of some sort but that these norms vary in terms of the sexual activities, and types of family relation to which they apply. 

Most societies have what is known as a core incest norm: all sexual intercourse between members of the nuclear family is forbidden. But societies also vary in how they extend that core norm. For example, in some tribal societies all marriages within the tribe are outlawed. The idea of variable content is illustrated below (note: the diagram is based on absolutely no data and is intended for illustrative purposes only).

This brings us to the final social-level fact about norms. Although norms cluster around general themes, there are usually exceptions to these general themes. Sticking with the example of incest, there is good evidence to suggest that brother-sister marriages have been tolerated in different times and places, e.g. in Egypt during the Roman period.

That's it for social-level facts. In Part 2 we'll cover individual-level facts about norms.