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A COMMON FRAMEWORK FOR THEORIES OF NORM COMPLIANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2018

Adam Morris
Affiliation:
Psychology, Harvard University
Fiery Cushman
Affiliation:
Psychology, Harvard University

Abstract:

Humans often comply with social norms, but the reasons why are disputed. Here, we unify a variety of influential explanations in a common decision framework, and identify the precise cognitive variables that norms might alter to induce compliance. Specifically, we situate current theories of norm compliance within the reinforcement learning framework, which is widely used to study value-guided learning and decision-making. This framework offers an appealingly precise language to distinguish between theories, highlights the various points of convergence and divergence, and suggests novel ways in which norms might penetrate our psychology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2018 

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Footnotes

*

We thank Jonathan Phillips and other members of the Moral Psychology Research Lab for their advice and assistance. This research was supported by Grant N00014-14-1-0800 from the Office of Naval Research.

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90 An alternative formulation of this idea is that the decision variables have different levels of informational encapsulation ( Fodor, J. A., The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983]):Google Scholar Q and R are more encapsulated than T, and there are therefore fewer types of experience that can change them. At the present, it is unknown how encapsulated the action set A s or the state space S are.