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...