Normative Conflict and Normative Change

Abstract

Human life is heavily structured by norms, many of which require individuals to adopt net-costly behaviors. Such costly behaviors often generate the non-rivalrous and non-excludable benefits that permit human ecological adaptation. However, models studying the mechanisms that stabilize costly-norms emphasize that their stability need not consider what group benefits the norm confers. Additionally, in a dynamic world, innovations, environmental change, and information revelation imply that what norms are beneficial for a group will change over time. Both of these phenomena emphasize the importance of understanding mechanisms of normative change. Explanations of intra-societal normative change are relatively rare, buy when investigated they have generally failed to identify conditions under which a mutant and more-beneficial behavior can invade a population characterized by a previously stabilized norm and have pointed to group-level selective mechanisms to explain the presence of adaptive norms. We construct a cultural evolutionary game theoretic model to study normative change by means of intra-societal costly-punishment and conflict resolution and identify social differentiation in punishment capacity as a key condition permitting normative change. Importantly, we find that this normative change will be group beneficial, however, the assumptions permitting said result appear to be highly restrictive.