The extraordinary value of ordinary norms

This research was conducted during a 5 week fellowship at the Centre for Effective Altruism. With thanks to Stefan Schubert, Max Dalton, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Justis Mills, Danae Arroyos, Patrick Miller, Ben Garfinkel, Alex Barry, Christian Tarsney, and Daniel Kokotajlo for their comments on this article.

The value of following norms

A supply of clean water is useful to all the members of a community. But if there is no other easy way to dispose of rubbish, any individual has an incentive to pollute the water. A little pollution won’t matter, so each individual might think it best to pollute. But if all individuals respond to this incentive, the total pollution ruins the water supply, destroying the public good.

One way of avoiding the problem is to set up social norms, and punish those who break the norms. You might fine or shun those who pollute the water supply. This will disincentivize pollution, and protect the supply for everyone.

Common-sense morality emphasizes the value of following social norms such as honesty and cooperation. Trust helps communities to cooperate, so we have a norm against lying. Helping others can make everyone better off, so we have a norm that we ought to help others. Being intellectually fair can help people to resolve disagreements, so we have norms against overconfidence and fallacious reasoning. We can call social common goods such as trust social capital. Breaking norms, and therefore destroying social capital, generally is punished with a worse reputation.

This means that there are normally two costs to breaking social norms. First, a broken norm damages the common good. The water supply is slightly poisoned; social capital is diminished. Second, the offender is harmed directly through punishment. They can expect to have a worse reputation if caught, and, in extreme cases, might suffer ostracization or job loss. Both effects are amplified when an offender acts within a community: not only does the individual damage the public good and risk retribution within the community, but the community itself may also suffer reputational effects as a whole. Since the community normally has a much more significant reputation than an individual, this extra effect can be large. For example, if a member of the community commits a crime, not only will that member be less wel

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