So the most amazing things about social norms is once they become established, it can appear as though, it could not have been any other way. Every behavior you do is also reciprocated by the people you know. But if you think about this man evolutionary perspective in terms of how we got here, there's a process by which we adjust our behavior to the people we interact with. I do something and I notice your responses. And as you see my response to your response, you also adjust what you're going to go next. And in this sort of coevolutionary process, we figure out what the best behavior is for us to get along and coordinate. Now in the context of the emperor's dilemma, one explanation might have been. Well, the reason we all figure out social norms and we can all agree on some behavior for the population is because that's always a good behavior. It's one that produces some benefit for all of us, but we saw on the emperor's dilemma is that that's not necessarily the case. In fact, it can happen that behaviors become locked in a overpopulation even though nobody wants them and they're welfare reducing. Another tie in is with a lesson from complex contagions. What we saw there was simple contagions spread very effectively through long ties and weak ties in a network. However, when we transitioned to looking at behavior spreading, we saw that local reinforcement and repeated interactions were actually much more effective for diffusion. So when we take these lessons into account both from the emperor's dilemma and from compost contagions, and try to apply that to the evolution of culture. The question we really come up with is where does culture come from in the first place? How do we ever get it off the ground if there's no motivating reason and it's also hard to diffuse? Well, one explanation has been that the institutions give us culture. So we have centralized governments that really tell everyone what to do. Everyone responds to those incentives and collectively they coordinate. Or in the case of organizations, you have top-down leadership. And this provides incentives for people in the organization to conform to standards of gender conventions or to norms of professional conduct, or even to standards of dress and attire. And as everyone sees each other conforming with these expectations, it becomes locked in as a social norm. It's a valuable explanation and really applicable in a lot of cases. However, it doesn't tell us how norms ever get started. The problem here is that in order to explain norms from a top-down authority, you need to explain how top-down authority ever got going in the first place. How did everyone know they should pay attention to the same leader? How did everyone know that they were within the same governmental context or the same organizational context? In other words, there need to be institutions in the first place to explain how institutions ever get off the ground. So we need an explanation that kind of goes underneath this and starts from more of a state of nature, and explains how people interacting with each other would ever form an institution or a social convention. Another option comes from the work of Haranyi and Selten who won the Nobel Prize for this work in 1988 on equilibrium selection, and what they point out is that there are some options that are just better than others. Some options have a better payoff or some options are just safer. Individually, we all recognize this advantage of those options. And then collectively, we see each other gravitated to options. We coordinate on those and that becomes a universally enforce coordination equilibrium. The problem with this is that in order for the solution to work, there needs to be a set of options in a population and we only need to know what those options are. Furthermore, we're all need to know a head of time to know what the payoffs for the options are. So basically, it's a world in which there is a fixed set of choices we can have behaviorally. And complete information about what the value of these choices is both in terms of the value for us and the value for everyone else and then we can figure out a coordination, equilibrium or social norm. So again, there's thick institutional assumptions here in order to make the solution work. So one of the approaches that has been developed more recently is to think about this in more of a social feedback context. Here we have a situation where there's lots of different options. In fact, an unbounded number of different options. And we don't know ahead of time, what the value of those options is. But nevertheless, we choose them and we pay attention to the options that other people choose as well. And through popularity, one option can kind of gain social influence. And the more that we see other people choosing that option, the more that we're drawn to that option just because of the people are choosing it. And through social feedback, that option can become dominant in the population. So this happens with bestseller lists where they organize all the media, the books, the music and so forth into a list of options which they then present in ordered fashion. So we can see which ones are most popular. And by virtue of being initially popular, they become subsequently more popular and this generates a social feedback that generates cultural convergence. And we also see this even with voting where we have polling that sometimes gives us information about what people are thinking and we use that information to update our own preferences, and ideas about what we should do. The problem with this solution once again is it relies on fairly thick institutional assumptions. There need to be some kind of centralized system of collating everyone's opinions in the population and reporting it back in a way that everyone's paying attention to like a best seller list or like a polling system, and everyone needs to use that information to then update their behavior in the future. In order for any of these systems to exist in the first place, however, there needs to be existing social conventions that coordinate us on using those standard of evaluating learned behavior. So once again, we're left with the basic question of how did norms ever get off the ground in the first place and how can we study this process empirically?
