Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms

The individuals who constitute a society often develop overlapping networks of values and preferences. For example, inhabitants of a city will routinely converge on similar aesthetic preferences, and similar assumptions about what's cool. Likewise, people from similar cultural backgrounds will often accept similar dietary norms, and pursue the same child rearing and marriage practices. Finally, people who have similar religious or political affiliations frequently form overlapping preferences about the best ways to respond to calls for gender equality and racial justice. These patterns of normative convergence, along with countless others, play an important role in many forms of social coordination; they ground shared identities and shared values; and they foster group cohesion. Without such convergence, human societies would be far less stable than they are. And while some of these patterns may be the result of species-typical moral dispositions (Hamlin 2013; Wynn et al. 2017), others are arbitrary, and still others remain stable even though they are detrimental to individual or collective well-being.In Norms in the Wild, Cristina Bicchieri explores the nature and status of social norms that emerge as the result of interdependent preferences. She argues that such norms can be studied empirically. And she shows how they can be changed where they are detrimental to individuals, or to the groups to which they belong. While many philosophers address similar kinds of issues, few do so in ways that are both empirically precise and socially meaningful. This is where Bicchieri excels. Using tools from philosophy, game theory, and psychology, she provides a rigorous account of how social norms behave in the wild; and more importantly, she uses case studies, as well as formal models and empirical tools, to explain how we can successfully change social norms that are deeply entrenched within a social group.The guiding insight of this book is that people “do not make choices in isolation: they pay attention to what other people do, and what others approve or disapprove of” (xiii). According to Bicchieri, the preference for following social norms is typically conditional on two kinds of expectations: the empirical expectation that others will conform to the same norms we do; and the normative expectation that others will believe that people ought to conform to these norms (35). This means that social norms never float free from the groups to which we belong; and in this respect, they are unlike our moral dispositions or our individual preferences. People will often continue to believe that they should stand by their moral principles when others act immorally. And they will often retain their individual preferences, even when they are unique among their friends and associates. But with social norms, we anchor our expectations to particular reference networks (i.e., the groups of people whose expectations matter to us in a particular context). These networks can be constituted by the people who we interact with daily, but they can also be structured around religious, national, or regional identities; they can even be structured by loosely affiliated groups, such as scientists or philosophers. In any case, where interdependent preferences emerge within a reference network, they become stable where they are mutually supported by empirical and normative expectations.This is often a good thing, as it would be difficult to navigate a world without social norms. But there are many cases where people accept problematic social norms. For example, people in many cultures refuse to give babies first breast milk, because they think it is dirty; open defecation remains common in many countries, and it is difficult to get people to use latrines even when they are built; and child marriage persists in many cultures, despite the harms that it causes. In developing strategies for changing norms in cases such as these, Bicchieri has shown that it is necessary to shift the empirical and normative expectations that are common within relevant reference networks. People tend to change their behavior when they have good reason to believe that others will do so as well, and when they have good reason to believe that others will shift their patterns of praise and blame to accord with a new norm. Consequently, lasting social change typically requires both the presence and recognition of socially shared reasons for action, which make people relatively certain that they are not acting alone. Of course, “the size of the deviating group that is needed to yield effective change varies from practice to practice” (108). But in general, people will only adopt a new social practice if they are fairly certain that they will not be sanctioned for doing so. This seems right and important.Over the course of this book, Bicchieri clarifies the implications of this view of social norms and their malleability. She shows that we must think far more structurally, and far more strategically about changing social norms. According to her model, attempts at changing social norms from the top down with legislative interventions or similar strategies will typically fail (144). After all, such interventions cannot provide evidence that empirical and normative expectations have shifted within the relevant reference group, and people care far more about one another than they do about the government. By contrast, interventions that begin from the bottom, using interpersonal strategies such as discussion and deliberation within a reference group, make it far more likely that people will come to understand the inconsistencies in their “ways of thinking and acting and come to a shared agreement about how to remedy these inconsistencies” (129–30; see also Bicchieri and Mercier 2014). The reason for this is simple: we recognize that shared values and shared commitments allow us to solve coordination problems; and we are willing to comply with the resulting agreements because we recognize that others are willing to do so as well (116). This is the forward-looking power of empirical and normative expectations.I was most impressed by Bicchieri's development of an account of how bottom-up interventions can be used to reshape the norms that govern behavior in a community. Sometimes, we might find that people are unaware of viable alternatives to the problematic norms they follow; and in these cases, she argues, people will often be willing to change their behavior once they are presented with alternatives, and once they are allowed to discuss, compare, and evaluate them (143). Sometimes, we might find that normative convergence is driven by pluralistic ignorance (i.e., few people support a norm, but most people believe that the practices that sustain it are widespread and widely supported; 122). And in such cases, we need to convince people that their normative expectations are misaligned with the normative expectations in their reference network. This isn't easy, but it can be done, through collective discussion and deliberation, and through people helping one another see what is commonly being assumed. That said, while it may seem like the best thing to do is to call attention to broad patterns of problematic behavior, this can sometimes send the signal that a behavior is common, and that people do not tend to sanction it—and this can unintentionally reinforce the empirical and normative expectations that support the problematic norm. So any interventions that attempt to overcome pluralistic ignorance will have to carefully track the effects on empirical and evaluative expectations.Perhaps the most difficult situations arise in contexts where people reject any data suggesting that a norm they follow is problematic. Here, successful interventions must begin by demonstrating that the norm is detrimental to individual or collective well-being. One route to change in such contexts is for small groups of trendsetters to adopt new practices; for if “these groups can be self-sufficient, they can break off from the broader network in which they were previously embedded and create their own independent reference network” (188). Another possibility is to use public interventions, such as television and radio programs, to affect social expectations. As Bicchieri argues, such programs can represent familiar characters and events, while introducing enough variation to reveal “alternative ways of behaving” (196). She shows that such interventions can provide “a tutorial for social change: through a vicarious reproduction of what effective change can look like, they demonstrate to viewers what they ‘should’ expect when engaging in particular scripts” (198). But just as importantly, Bicchieri argues that lasting changes become much more likely when people discuss such programs with other members of their reference group. Such discussions can evoke lasting social change by changing patterns of interaction, and making it clear that others are shifting both their empirical and normative expectations.All told, I recommend this book highly to both teachers of philosophy and those who are interested in understanding social norms more fully. Some people may be apprehensive about the use of game theory, behavioral economics, and formal models to explain social change. But throughout the book, Bicchieri writes in a clear, engaging, and jargon-free way. And she shows that models of social behavior can be de-idealized, and then used to develop a better understanding of the malleability of social norms in real-world contexts. More importantly, she addresses genuine social problems, and explains the presence, stability, and malleability of these phenomena.Those who have followed Bicchieri's previous work will find many of her claims in this book familiar. And from their perspective, her decision not to engage with theoretical alternatives may seem problematic. But I think that Bicchieri is proceeding down a different tack. Her aim is to articulate a set of concrete strategies for diagnosing, measuring, and changing social norms, in situations where things are incredibly messy. By detailing the results of her work with international aid organizations like UNICEF, she makes it clear that an empirically driven account of normative change must move beyond theoretical elegance to demonstrate that there are ways of addressing people's concrete, lived experience of the world. And while I'm not positive that she is right in every respect, I find it hard to know what a plausible alternative looks like, as there are very few attempts to implement alternative views in real-world contexts. This will only change as more philosophers begin to explore social norms in the wild. And hopefully this book helps to motivate more philosophers to do so.