Overly Smooth Drained Strict Costly Norms

Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, which we had working long before language. Back then we “vibed” by watching and copying others’ behaviors, and synching those to ours. In this way, we learned how to, and coordinated our: production, governance, norms, bonding within each community, and badging to show to which communities we belonged.

The rise of language was at first a small aid to coordinating such things. Words mainly referred to things we vibed, so we checked language claims against visible vibes. But over time words became more abstract, and more checked against other words and word-based summaries of observations. We slowly expanded the world of words, via writing, printing, computing, interpretation, logic, debate, and systems of education, law, science, engineering, and accounting. And also via more trade and a larger division of labor.

In the modern world, these changes induced more complex production, faster rates of change, and more mixing of people from previously separated cultures and contexts, all of which made it harder to use vibes to produce, govern, norm, bond, and badge. So we instead moved to use explicit language more to achieve these functions.

In particular, for norm definition and enforcement, we have come to rely less on a vibed sense, shared by close observers, that particular acts were norm violations, and more on language expressions of norms applied to third-party-verifiable language descriptions of actions. So we’ve changed norms and their enforcement to depend less on details of context that outsiders cannot see, vibe, or understand.

Thus our norms have been smoothed, likely losing many context-specific adaptive details created by millennia of prior cultural evolution. And as a result, they’ve often become drained of a lot of adaptive value. Though this process may at times average over many noisily-adaptive norms to extract a more reliable adaptive signal, when those merged norm contexts had a similar-enough underlying adaptive structure.

These modern changes also made it much harder to bond and badge. Small peasant communities once bonded quite naturally by living and working in similar ways right next to each other, and badged naturally via each community drifting toward somewhat different styles of food, clothes, language, etc., variations that imposed few local adaption penalties. We moderns work harder to substitute for these lost bonding and badging mechanisms by using religion, sports, music, humor, and fiction, but we find it hard to synch such things across the very wide scopes over which we moderns interact. Some of these work better for bonding while others work better for badging, but none work well for both at the widest scopes.

We moderns have thus turned to contested norms as our main way to bond and badge across the widest scopes. Especially via the process of spontaneous synched expressions of outrage regarding particular violations. Accusations of violations of simple-language-expressed norms, based on widely visible behavior, can serve both to bond people with others who feel similar emotional outrage, and to badge them as belonging to subcultures who feel especially outraged. Often subcultures agree on which parameters are good or bad, but disagree on parameter relative weights. Contested norms are of course less likely to be adaptive.

This eagerness to bond via sharing outrage on contested norms plausibly induces a neglect of shared norms, and an overly strict yet inconsistent enforcement of contested norms, as norm enforcers often care more about burnishing their image as justice warriors than about getting right the tradeoffs and consistency of norms re their key function of shaping behaviors. Cultural evolution plausibly hasn’t had time to weaken such norms and add consistency to compensate for these recent changes.

A standard result regarding political and cultural competition within a shared space is that differences between political coalitions and subcultures tend to collapse to a one-dimensional spectrum, even when the underlying space of possibilities is high dimensional. Attempts to emphasize other dimensions tend to be seen as betrayals of this one key dimension of conflict. This single dimension tends to be one where the more adaptive choices are less clear, and struggles within each side of this main conflict sometimes lead to realignments that change this dimension’s direction.

As a result, we end up seeing little variation on which cultural evolution can act. Furthermore, individual efforts to show loyalty to particular sides tend to create costly signaling games, i.e., contests to show that one is more devoted than others. This results in each side’s norms drifting toward more costly extremes.

The modern world has thus created an environment that tends to promote norms that are overly smooth and thereby drained, and when contested overly strict but inconsistent, and costly. All relative to a behavior adaptiveness standard. Our norms are thus plausibly becoming less adaptive.

Added 19July: This helps us see why most are wary of seeing cultural drift problems with how we evolve norms: such a view threatens abilities to bond and badge.

Also, this account predicts norm decay, such as cuts in norms that induce enforcement of norms. While the ancients often failed to enforced norms imposed from outside, or on elites, they strongly enforced norms on local equals. We in contrast, have more norms that we don’t enforce. For example, we have a norm against cutting into car lines, but also a norm against enforcing this norm. It is also rude to point out rudeness, or to point out that particular others don’t pick up checks, don’t return borrowed items, interrupt in conversation, or take credit for your ideas. More generally, it looks bad to go out of your way to enforce uncontested norms by yourself.