Abstract
Review of Cristina Bicchieri's Norms in the wild: how to diagnose, measure, and change social norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xviii + 239 pp.
Highlights
NORMS IN THE WILD / BOOK REVIEW and offers an overview of how these ideas can be applied to concrete problems
More generally, R is a social norm iff R depends on the beliefs and preferences of the members of P in the following way: (1) Almost every member of P prefers to conform to R on the condition that almost everyone else conforms, too
In the Grammar we find the following, more sophisticated account: R is a social norm in a population P if there exists a sufficiently large subset of P such that, for each individual belonging to this subset: (1) i knows that a rule R exists and applies to situations of type S; (2) i prefers to conform to R in situations of type S on the condition that: (a) i believes that a sufficiently large subset of P conforms to R
Summary
Bicchieri has tried to give an answer to this question for more than two decades. The key elements can be found already in Rationality and coordination (1993), and have been developed in later work with slight modifications. Condition 2(a) is called “Empirical expectations”, while 2(b) is “Normative expectations” and 2(b’) is “Normative expectations with sanctions” These requirements distinguish Bicchieri’s theory of norms from every significant account proposed earlier, making individual preferences conditional on a set of connected beliefs or expectations. Another way to put it is to say that Rationality and coordination offered a reductive account of social norms, while The grammar of society and (more explicitly) Norms in the wild do not. The sort of ‘reactive attitudes’, à la Strawson, that we use on a daily basis to regulate each other’s behaviour Following the latter approach would make Bicchieri’s theory rather similar to its main current rival, the account of norms as clusters of normative attitudes proposed by Geoffrey Brennan et al (2010). We are spared the details, and the causes of our motivation to fulfil others’ expectations remain largely opaque
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