Norms, preferences, and conditional behavior

This article addresses several issues raised by Nichols, Gintis, and Skyrms and Zollman in their comments on my book, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. In particular, I explore the relation between social and personal norms, what an adequate game-theoretic representation of norms should be, and what models of norms emergence should tell us about the formation of normative expectations. keywords social norms, personal norms, expectations, experimental games, Bayesian games, evolutionary models The articles contributed to this issue touch several crucial matters that need to be addressed by a theory of norms. The first is essentially an empirical question: how do we know, when we observe behavior in the laboratory, that participants are following a norm, and if so, is it a personal or a social norm? The second has to do with the game-theoretic representation of norms as equilibria, and the issue raised here is what sort of games best represent norms as opposed to, say, conventions. Finally, there is the question of how norms emerge, and how to model such a process convincingly. I have tackled some of these issues in my book and subsequent papers,1 so in what follows I will discuss my most recent results, as well as suggest possible ways to proceed to address what are still very open questions. The personal and the social Facing experimental data that defy the hypothesis of self-regarding preferences, experimental economists have focused their attention on so-called social preferences, and even when admitting that social norms may indeed play a role in influencing behavior, nobody has gone beyond this generic assertion. This is not politics, philosophy & economics article DOI: 10.1177/1470594X10369276 Cristina Bicchieri, Philosophy Department, 491 Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania, 249 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304, USA [email: [email protected]] 297 © SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore