Group Affiliation and Altruistic Norm Enforcement

摘要

Social norms are standards of behavior that are based on widely shared beliefs about how individual group members ought to behave in a given situation. Social norms affect almost every aspect of human life, and humans are probably unique among all species in the extent to which they regulate social affairs with social norms. There are norms of fairness, cooperation, politeness, honesty, and subordination; norms regarding gender relations, race relations, parent-child relations, and so on. Many people often obey social norms voluntarily because their individual goals are in line with the behavior normatively prescribed. The situation where all group members' interests align with the prevailing norms in a society, however, is indeed rare. The threat of punishment thus generally plays a crucial role in enforcing adherence to norms. Some social norms in modern societies take the form of legal rules that the police and the courts enforce. But even today, private third parties, i.e., individuals whom the violation does not affect economically, often enforce norms by imposing informal sanctions. In fact, the existence of private third-party sanctions can be viewed as a hallmark of social norms because if only the victims of norm violations were willing to punish, the scope for norm enforcement, and thus for norms in regulating social life, would be quite limited.