For decades social choice theory has tried to understand group decision-making in terms of the aggregation of preferences. The general conclusion has been that aggregating preferences kind of sucks no matter what you do: you’ll end up with a dictator or with people lying about what they want
What do you think of the paper "Norms Make Preferences Social" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43965319)? It argues that we don’t have fixed internal preferences for things like charitable giving or reciprocity (contrary to the literature in economics that claims we have stable preferences about others). Instead, it suggests that social norms and rules are real and influential, and that we have a tendency to follow them.
You gave the example of not bumping into someone in a corridor — a simple coordination game with an obvious solution (both people move to avoid each other). But there are much more complex decisions, like contributing to a public good, where everyone has an incentive to defect and keep their own money. Still, perhaps norms can help us coordinate to solve even these harder problems.
From what I understand of the literature, almost no one is truly altruistic — there isn’t really an innate preference to help others. But collectively, we can still arrive at optimal (or at least workable) solutions, especially when those solutions have already been partly carved out for us by social norms, which we then align ourselves with.
Good comment, I will write a post about related ideas. We don't have fixed preferences for anything imo (https://interestingessays.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-terminal), but the stable preferences claim is pretty reasonable, it's basically a primitive version of allostasis AFAICT.
What do you think of the paper "Norms Make Preferences Social" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43965319)? It argues that we don’t have fixed internal preferences for things like charitable giving or reciprocity (contrary to the literature in economics that claims we have stable preferences about others). Instead, it suggests that social norms and rules are real and influential, and that we have a tendency to follow them.
You gave the example of not bumping into someone in a corridor — a simple coordination game with an obvious solution (both people move to avoid each other). But there are much more complex decisions, like contributing to a public good, where everyone has an incentive to defect and keep their own money. Still, perhaps norms can help us coordinate to solve even these harder problems.
From what I understand of the literature, almost no one is truly altruistic — there isn’t really an innate preference to help others. But collectively, we can still arrive at optimal (or at least workable) solutions, especially when those solutions have already been partly carved out for us by social norms, which we then align ourselves with.
Good comment, I will write a post about related ideas. We don't have fixed preferences for anything imo (https://interestingessays.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-terminal), but the stable preferences claim is pretty reasonable, it's basically a primitive version of allostasis AFAICT.
Norms should fall under relationship regulation theory (https://interestingessays.substack.com/p/morality-as-a-quasi-cognitive-glue). Basically, people act to be in accordance with models of relationships. Norms are a subset of this. I don't think they play a critical role in enabling coordination. Instead, I think general Aumannian effects do that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem; https://interestingessays.substack.com/p/interoception-sharing-as-all-the), and norms are a first-person experience of allostatic predictions about relational models, or something to that effect.