To Sue Or To Shun?

Social norms can be enforced formally or informally. That is, one can have either laws, or informal sanctions enforce by “mobs”. Both systems can discourage unwanted behaviors, and isolate unwanted people. So we usually face a choice: to discourage such things via law or via shunning (or both). 

To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree enough on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, and to fund the costs of enforcing related laws. This approval process might take a lot of time. Then regarding particular accusations, we must stand ready to invoke a perhaps expensive court process, a process that can only rely on sources of information that are visible and verifiable to it. This process is more careful and accurate in its decisions, but also easier for central powers to control.

In contrast, to invoke shunning, a smaller community can agree more informally on more nebulous descriptions of unwanted behaviors. And also agree more informally who is responsible for shunning (or otherwise censuring) those who violate such descriptions, and to shun those who refuse to shun such violations when responsible. (Shunning is more than individuals responding selfishly to info that accurately updates reputations; instead one pays a personal cost to shun folks with which you would otherwise be willing to associate.)

These informal agreements can often arise and change faster than with law. Shunning actions can be mild and low cost, and can be triggered by information that would not be visible or verifiable to law, though such information will need to be visible to many within the community who shuns. Compared to law, shunning has fewer options available to deal with those “convicted” of violations. 

Given these differences, when does it make sense to use shunning instead of law? One plausible case is where violations are frequent and small, making it reasonable to use small shunning acts in response. We use this sort of strategy re cutting in lines, who should let who into a door first, or who can interrupt who when in conversation. Given current legal practices it seems much more expensive to use law to deal with such things, though I have outlined a proposal by which we might greatly reduce such legal costs. 

A second plausible case is where a community that is small compared to the community that shares law needs to encourage good internal behaviors. They might find it hard to create enforceable formal rules via contract or the rules of an encompassing org, and might also find it hard to induce the larger shared law to add new rules about their group’s internal behaviors. In which case they might be forced to resort to internal shunning. By using shunning, this smaller community might also be able to make use of local info in their choices, info that would not be available to a more distant legal system. Note that such local info would be available to a formal legal system limited to this smaller community. 

In a third plausible case, a smaller community seeks to persuade a larger encompassing community which shares law to adopt some new laws. So they start with a “trial balloon” system of shunning, to show that it is often enough feasible to distinguish such behavior, and also to show that enough people sufficiently disapprove of these behaviors. This trial period might also allow for a lot of fast and flexible experimentation, trying out different definitions of offenses, parties responsible for noticing and reporting offenses, and kinds and levels of censure for each offense. In this case, we expect to see this trial spread widely around society, and also to see only a temporary period of shunning, followed either by adoption of new more-effective-than-shunning laws, or this smaller community giving up on this persuasion attempt. 

In a fourth case, a large community that shares law might be broken into large competing “political” factions, each trying to expand its influence within this larger community. And one way to do this is to repeatedly “conquer territories”. That is, when a faction happens to be strong in some particular social area of life, that locally dominant faction can use its local power to try to push out local members of other factions, and get those who remain to signal their loyalty to this faction. 

This can be done via faction-aligned shunning. Get your faction to believe that a particular ambiguous often-accidentally-committed offense is more likely to be committed by other factions. Then push local faction members to shun those who they label as guilty of this offense (and those who don’t so shun), and encourage faction members to use their faction-aligned intuitions when judging who to declare guilty. The net result will be to push members of this faction out of this area, leaving a population who has visibly signaled their allegiance to this faction, via avoiding this offense and punishing those who commit it. 

This strategy works better if one prioritizes grabbing the social “high grounds”, places from which one can exert unusual influence over other places. Such as academia, journalism, finance, law, tech, and governance. This strategy also works especially well when other factions refuse to use it, due to their obeying unenforced norms against faction-promoting behaviors in those areas.  

I see stronger reasons to approve of the use of shunning in the first three cases, compared to this last case.