People follow social norms because they believe that others follow these norms and expect the same of them. Some (most?) social norms involve conflicts between preferences of different people. The resolution of such conflicts is also the central question of morality as we know it. Social norms specify how such conflicts should be resolved. Moral norms go beyond this specification because they apply everywhere and are not contingent on what people expect or do, but the address the same questions.
What does it mean to be selfish? It is not just acting in your self-interest; most self-interested behavior is expected in prevailing norms, as well as moral norms. Social norms differ. A minor example is tipping in restaurants. (Rarely done at all in some countries, expected in the U.S., at 15 or 20%.) Selfishness is when you take more for yourself, or try to, e.g., by leaving 10% when the service was perfectly fine. Or by taking the last helping without checking to see whether everyone else at the table has had their share.
Social and moral norms set minimum standards for what you are supposed to do when your interests conflict with those of others. It is often in our interest to break the law, for example, by leaving trash, or worse, on the sidewalk. Many laws are not enforced very well, or at all. But both moral and social norms say you should follow relevant laws, and most people do that. Social norms do not oblige you to clean up other people's trash, although morally it would be a good thing.
When you err from the norm on the side of others, that is altruistic but it also puts you at risk of being a sucker, being fooled, and that can be embarrassing because you are not looking out for yourself in the way you should (for yourself). You lose status. You are embarrassed. You are a sucker if you hand money to a homeless person who will then just spend it on booze or drugs. Or if you pick up other people's trash even though the city pays people to do that periodically. The behavior of others tells you what the social norm is. Trust of any sort is dangerous because you could be fooled, taken advantage of. So people take extra steps to prevent that outcome, such as signing contracts and asking for receipts.
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan (my former PhD student) has written an account of the (to me) surprising number of manifestations of fear of being a sucker ("Fool proof: How fear of playing the sucker shapes ourselves and the social order -- and what we can do about it" Harper-Collins). These manifestations occur in both individuals and governments. They include (as just noted) reluctance to trust individuals or institutions, and reluctance to make many types of voluntary contributions. Trust issues arise in ordinary commercial translations, sexual and romantic relationships, employer/employee relations, job searches (on both sides), as well as international agreements. Sucker fear often prevents beneficial relations, although sometimes it is warranted. It arises whenever fair division is not obvious, as various definitions of fairness could advantage one party or another, and the disadvantaged party could feel like a fool for agreeing to a plan. Sucker fear also exacerbates other effects, such as prejudice against some group: where a stereotype can lead to mistrust group members and unwillingness to cooperate with them. Such groups include poor people (who rip off the rich by asking for help), women, immigrants, Blacks, and Jews. Paranoid delusions of persecution, an extreme form of mistrust, are often manifestations of sucker fear.
The book also describes the efforts that people make to recover from the regret, embarrassment, or anger that they feel when they have actually been fooled. Experiments on "cognitive dissonance", in which people try to convince themselves that something they were tricked into doing was not bad after all, even to the point of telling the next research subject that an extremely boring task was actually interesting. As for anger, physical attacks on malfunctioning vending machines are apparently a source of injury for the attackers as well as the machines.
Perhaps the best single example of most of the manifestations of sucker fear is Donald Trump, who comes up at several places in the book. But the book was written before he was re-elected. His second term provides one clear case after another of extreme actions based on sucker fear or the feeling that he was, or is at risk of, being a fool. These include trade, election procedures, contributions to NATO, and foreign aid. His apparent beliefs about elections lost by him or his supporters seem paranoid, combining delusions of grandeur with delusions of persecution. When he actually did play the fool, apparently being convinced by Benjamin Netanyahu that invading Iran would bring about regime change in short order and have no unacceptable side effects, he denies that anyone made a mistake and insists that the results are just fine.
The book, I should note, is published as a trade book, and it is highly readable, full of interesting anecdotes. Beyond this, its analysis of people's thoughts and emotions is truly psychological, emphasizing how people think and what emotions they experience. And its thoroughness in discussing relevant literature (with citations in end notes) makes it useful in the way that good textbooks are useful.
Social norms put a lower bound on what we are expected to give up when our preferences might conflict with others' preferences. Sucker fear often puts an upper bound on these expectations. In the end, many social norms specify that we do something but no more than that. We are left with a narrow band. Of course, these norms themselves are variable, and people differ in what we would like the norms to be. For many people, the norm is that voting is expected but voting on the basis of valid information is not. The attempt to do that could leave us at the mercy of charlatans who fake validity, so it is OK to vote on the basis of intuition. Likewise, contributions of time or money to a political campaign could end up wasted, making suckers of contributors. The same goes for many kinds of self-sacrifice for uncertain benefits to others.
No comments:
Post a Comment