Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:57:58.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

SOCIAL NORMS OF COORDINATION AND COOPERATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2018

Gerry Mackie*
Affiliation:
Political Science, University of California, San Diego

Abstract:

The scholarly discourse on social norms in the tradition of Thomas Schelling (1960) often makes a sharp distinction between social norms and social conventions. In attempting to apply that distinction to actual practices and to teach it to practitioners and students I encountered frequent difficulties and confusions, and finally concluded that it is untenable. I recommend a return to some version of Ullman-Margalit’s (1977) distinction between social norms of cooperation and social norms of coordination. Social norms, I say, are distinguished by beliefs in a relevant group that the rule is typical among them and approved of among them. I describe four ways that social norms of coordination, including conventions of social meaning, are influenced by social approval and disapproval. I contend that the effort by Southwood and Eriksson (2011) to show that social conventions and social norms are essentially different breaks down because their conception of social norms is overly moralized. I present a more social conception of social norms that does without the regnant distinction between “social norm” and “social convention” and instead allows for social norms of cooperation, social norms of coordination, and other kinds of social norms.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Schelling, Thomas C., The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).Google Scholar

2 Bicchieri, Cristina, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);Google Scholar Coleman, James S., Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1988);Google Scholar Elster, Jon, The Cement of Society: A Survey of Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);CrossRefGoogle Scholar McAdams, Richard H., “The Origin, Development, and Regulation of Norms,” Michigan Law Review 96 (1997): 338433;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Southwood, Nicholas and Eriksson, Lina, “Norms and Conventions,” Philosophical Explorations 14, no. 2 (2011): 195217;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sugden, Robert, The Economics of Rights, Co-operation and Welfare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).Google Scholar

3 Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Mineola: Dover Press, 2003 [1738]).Google Scholar

5 Mackie, Gerry, “Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account,” American Sociological Review (1996): 9991017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Fox, Kate, Watching the English (London: Hodder, 2004).Google Scholar

7 Ullman-Margalit, Edna, The Emergence of Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

8 Southwood and Eriksson, Norms and Conventions.

9 Burke, Mary A. and Peyton Young, H., “Social Norms,” in Benhabib, Jess, Bisin, Alberto, and Jackson, Matthew O., eds., The Handbook of Social Economics (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011), 311–38.Google Scholar

10 Gerry Mackie, Francesca Moneti, Holly Shakya, and Elaine Denny, What Are Social Norms? How Are They Measured? (New York: UNICEF, 2016). tinyurl.com/measurenorms

11 Modified from Mackie et al., What Are Social Norms, which was adapted in part from Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society and from Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen, Predicting and Changing Behavior: The Reasoned Action Approach (New York: Psychology Press, 2010).

12 Levy Paluck, Elizabeth and Ball, Laurie, Social Norms Marketing Aimed at Gender Based Violence: A Literature Review and Critical Assessment (New York: International Rescue Committee, 2010).Google Scholar

13 Moreover, important developments requiring only minor departures from Lewis’s framework show how conventions can arise from structures that are not coordination games in his strict sense. These moves are based on the solution concept of correlated equilibrium that may yield a better and more unified account of the game-theoretic structures underlying social norms, and resolve some of the issues I have raised here in a different way. See, e.g., Peter Vanderschraaf, “Knowledge, Equilibrium, and Convention,” Erkenntnis, 49 (1998): 337–69; and Francesco Guala, Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

14 This is my adaptation of ideas from Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and McAdams, The Origin, Development, and Regulation of Norms.

15 Ullman-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms.

16 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 354.

17 Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict.

18 Lewis, David K., Convention: A Philosophical Study, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

19 Lewis, Convention, 97–100.

20 Francesco Guala, “The Normativity of Lewis Conventions,” Synthese 190, no. 15 (2013): 3107–3122.

21 Lewis, Convention, 76.

22 Ibid., 78.

23 Ibid., 77.

24 Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society, 38.

25 Ross, W. D., The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, Vol. IX: The Nichomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925).Google Scholar

26 Giovanna Devetag and Andreas Ortmann, “Solving Coordination Problems Experimentally,” in Murray Webster and Jane Sell, eds., Laboratory Experiments in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 2007).

27 Mackie, “Ending Footbinding and Infibulation.”

28 Michael Rescola, “Convention,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011.

29 Fox, Watching the English.

30 Page Fiske, Alan, “Four Modes of Constituting Relationships,” in Haslam, Nick, ed., Relational Models Theory (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 2004).Google Scholar

31 Goffman, Erving, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” American Anthropologist 58, no. 3 (1956): 473502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Ackerman, Felicia, “A Man by Nothing Is So Well Betrayed as by His Manners? Politeness as a Virtue,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13, no. 7 (1988): 250–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Culpeper, Jonathan, Impoliteness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Lessig, Lawrence, “The Regulation of Social Meaning,” University of Chicago Law Review 62 (1995): 943.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Southwood and Eriksson, Norms and Conventions.

36 Ullman-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms, 124.

37 Southwood and Eriksson, Norms and Conventions, 199.

38 Haffner, Sebastion, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (New York: Macmillan, 2003).Google Scholar

39 Prentice, Deborah A. and Miller, Dale T., “Pluralistic Ignorance and Alcohol Use on Campus: Some Consequences of Misperceiving the Social Norm,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 2 (1993): 243–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory.