Full metadata
Title
How Norms Are Maintained and How They Change: A Mathematical Model and a Field Study
Description
Social norms are unwritten behavioral codes. They direct individual behaviors, facilitate interpersonal coordination and cooperation, and lead to variation among human populations. Understanding how norms are maintained and how they change is critical for understanding human evolutionary psychology, social organization, and cultural change. This dissertation uses a mathematical model and a field study to answer two questions: First, what factors determine the content and dynamics of a social norm? Second, how do people make decisions in a normative context? The mathematical model finds that contrary to the popular belief that even arbitrary or deleterious social norms can be maintained once established because deviants suffer coordination failures and social sanctions, norms with continuously varying options cannot be maintained by the pressure to do what others do. Instead, continuous norms evolve to the optimum determined by environmental pressure, individual preferences, or cognitive processes. Therefore, the content of norms across human societies may be less historically constrained than previously assumed. The field study shows that unlike what rational choice theory predicts, people in a small-scale subsistence society do not calculate the ecological and social payoffs of different behaviors in a normative context, even when they have the information to do so. Instead, they rely heavily on social information about what others do. This decision-making algorithm, together with mental categorization that ignores small deviations, and cognitive biases that favor the division prescribed by the norm, maintain an ecologically inefficient and widely disliked cooperative surplus division norm in a Derung village, Dizhengdang, in Yunnan, China.
Date Created
2023
Contributors
- Yan, Minhua (Author)
- Boyd, Robert (Thesis advisor)
- Mathew, Sarah (Thesis advisor)
- Hruschka, Daniel (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
177 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.189337
Level of coding
minimal
Cataloging Standards
Note
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2023
Field of study: Anthropology
System Created
- 2023-08-28 05:08:24
System Modified
- 2023-08-28 05:08:28
- 1 year 3 months ago
Additional Formats