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PERSPECTIVES, NORMS, AND AGENCY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2017

Ryan Muldoon
Ryan Muldoon*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo
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Abstract:

A core set of assumptions in economic modeling is that rational agents, who have a defined preference set, assess their options and determine which best satisfies their preferences. The rational actor model supposes that the world provides us with a menu of options, and we simply choose what’s best for us. Agents are independent of one another, and they can rationally assess which of their options they wish to pursue. This gives special authority to the choices that people make, since they are understood to be the outcomes of the agent’s considered judgments. However, we have come to see that the independence assumption does not always hold in the way that we may have initially thought. Social norms can govern our choices even when we disagree with them. Here we can begin to see how the standard model of choice and agency begins to weaken: no longer are my choices wholly mine, but instead there is a subset of choices that are governed by the broader culture that I live in. Social norms constrain my behavior with informal coercion — my desire to remain a community member in good standing requires me to behave in accordance with the community’s social norms. What I wish to challenge more substantively is the claim that the menu of choices agents “see” is in fact the objective set of options that is transparently provided by the world. Instead, I argue that the options that people perceive and the evidence they use to make choices are mediated by perspectives. Perspectives can importantly interact with social norms to make some norms more resilient to change, and others harder to adopt. This further shapes both our descriptive and normative understanding of agency. Our choices are not over all of the objectively available options, but over the options that we can see. The evidence we marshal to support our choices is not the full set of evidence, but the evidence that we recognize as salient. This is not to deny that individuals have agency, but rather we need a more nuanced understanding of the nature of this agency.

Keywords

Social normsagencyperspectivesmental modelsinterdependenceresponsibilityequilibriafocal pointsaspirationevidence
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Summer 2017 , pp. 260 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2017 

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Footnotes

*

The Author would like to thank Jonathan Anomaly, Sebastiano Bavetta, Cristina Bicchieri, and Gerald Gaus for their helpful comments and discussion.

References

1 Muldoon, Ryan, Lisciandra, Chiara, Bicchieri, Cristina, Hartmann, Stephan and Sprenger, Jan, “On the Emergence of Descriptive Norms,” Philosophy, Politics & Economics 13, no. 1 (2013)Google Scholar offers a more detailed argument about the role of social norms in shaping culture. Muldoon, Ryan, “Exploring tradeoffs in accommodating moral diversity,” Philosophical Studies (2016). doi: 10.1007/s11098-016-0825-x explores how this extends to more formal institutional arrangementsGoogle Scholar.

2 Bicchieri, Cristina, The Grammar of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 There are several other competing accounts of social norms (See Cristina Bicchieri and Ryan Muldoon, “Social Norms” [Spring 2011] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for an overview), but I rely on the Bicchieri account in part because it is an operationalized definition that allows me to connect it to the experimental literature quite directly. Anomaly, Jonathan and Brennan, Geoffrey, “Social Norms, The Invisible Hand, and the Law,” University of Queensland Law Journal 33, no. 2 (2013): 263–83,Google Scholar offers a useful account that moves away from the notion that norms are always in equilibrium.

4 Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society.

5 On the interpretation of norms that I offer here, norms could remain functionalist and optimizing, and we could still get regional variation, just so long as not every population shares the same objective function. This will be discussed in greater detail later.

6 Schelling, Thomas, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

7 Gaus, Gerald, “The Egalitarian Species,” Social Philosophy and Policy 31, no. 2 (2015): 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, offers a compelling account of why our moral evolution has pushed us to find the 50-50 split focal, absent other considerations.

8 Sen raised this first in his Tanner lectures, then in Inequality Reexamined, and again most recently in The Idea of Justice (Amartya Sen, “Equality of What?” The Tanner Lecture on Human Values [May 1979]; Sen, Inequality Reexamined [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992]; Sen, The Idea of Justice [Boston: Belknap Press, 2011].)

9 For a longer discussion of perspectives, see Page’s, Scott The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar or Muldoon’s Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2016).

10 A striking example of the strength of this filter is the selective attention task. Simons, Daniel and Chabris, Christopher, “Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28 (1999): 1059–1044CrossRefGoogle Scholar showed subjects a video and prior to viewing, the participants were instructed to count the number of times a basketball is passed between individuals wearing white shirts. During the video, someone in a gorilla suit walks through the scene. Only about half of viewers notice.

11 Besides the theoretical work referenced in previous notes, the literature on framing effects in psychology demonstrates how triggering different perspectives can result in different choices being made. Gain/loss framing is the most common, but a striking example of this is in experimental results with the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Ross and Nisbett (Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology [New York: Pinter and Martin Ltd., 1991]) found that labeling the game “The community game” induced cooperation, whereas labeling it “The Wall Street game” induced defection. No material circumstances were changed, just the labels. This has been confirmed in a series of subsequent papers, including Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (Liberman, Varda, Samuels, Steven M., and Ross, Lee, “The Name of the Game: Predictive Power of Reputations versus Situational Labels in Determining Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Moves,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30, no. 9 [2004]: 1175–85)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. World Development Report (World Bank Group, World Development Report: Mind, Society, and Behavior [Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015]) discusses perspectives at length (though refers to them as mental models), particularly in chapter 3.

12 Ross and Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology; Liberman, Samuels, and Ross, “The Name of the Game,” 1175–85; World Bank Group, World Development Report.

13 Markus, H. R. and Kitayama, S., “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–53;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kashima, Y., Tamaguchi, S., Kim, U., Choi, S. C., Gelfand, M., and Yuki, M., “Culture, Gender, and Self: A Perspective from Individualism-Collectivism Research,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1995): 925–37,CrossRefGoogle Scholar are examples of East-West differences in a sense of agency and individualism.

14 This agreement does not have to be deliberative agreement. Importantly, it can easily be the product of the process of social evolution.

15 See Strogatz, Steven, Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life (New York: Hyperion, 2004)Google Scholar.

16 Ross, Lee and Nisbett, Richard, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social PsychologyGoogle Scholar.

17 The findings of this and similar studies are in a UK government report available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fraud-error-and-debt-behavioural-insights-team-paper.

18 Beaman, Lori, Duflo, Esther, Pande, Rohini, and Topalova, Petia, “Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India,” Science 335.6068 (2012): 582–86;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Beaman, Lori, Chattopadhyay, Raghab, Duflo, Esther, Pande, Rohini, and Topalova, Petia, “Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 4 (2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Tanguy Bernard, Stefan Dercon, Kate Orkin, and Alemayehu SeyoumTeffesse, “Learning with Others: A Field Experiment on the Formation of Aspirations in Rural Ethiopia” draft paper, Oct 2013.

20 As the average score for the highest-performing group on this challenging math test was 54 percent, an 11 percent swing represents about 20 percent of the students’ total performance frontier, which is quite substantial.

21 Shih, M., Pittinsjy, T. L., and Ambady, Nalini, “Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance,” Psychological Science 10, no. 1 (1999): 80–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Muldoon, Ryan, “Expanding the Justificatory Framework of Mill’s Experiments in Living,” Utilitas 27, no. 2 (2002): 79–194Google Scholar.

23 Alesina, Alberto, Giuliano, Paola, and Nunn, Nathan, “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 2 (2013): 469–530.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Ibid.

25 Bavetta, Sebastiano and Navarra, Pietro, The Economics of Freedom: Theory, Measurement, and Policy Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 This is explored in more detail in Muldoon, Ryan, Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.