Non-rational compliance with social norms: sincere and hypocritical
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
English Jon Elster has suggested that social norm compliance cannot be explained using rational-choice theory alone, as it also involves emotional motivations. We propose to expand on this proposition by adding another extra-rational aspect. According to Pierre Bourdieu, non-rational compliance earns greater group approval than interested compliance. We model this insight by stating that social norms contain an injunction not to comply rationally. The article begins with a study of motivations underlying social norm compliance, including “hypocritical compliance”, or rational compliance disguised as sincere and disinterested. This part is followed by a critique of the “economy of esteem” model. We introduce in the third part the concept of “hypocritical equilibrium”, in which most agents pretend to comply non-rationally while feigning not to notice that most others do the same. This kind of equilibrium is sustained by esteem-seeking and self-deception. The fourth part is an application of our model to dueling norms. We then conclude by looking at alternative models. Our aim is to show that, in social norm compliance, taking motivations seriously can yield explanations that strict rational-choice models cannot produce. French Selon Jon Elster, le conformisme aux normes sociales ne peut pas s’expliquer uniquement par la théorie du choix rationnel, car il met en jeu des motivations de nature émotionnelle. Nous proposons d’aller au delà de cette proposition en y ajoutant un autre aspect en dehors de la rationalité. Pour Pierre Bourdieu, le conformisme non rationnel est mieux accepté par le groupe que le conformisme intéressé. Nous modélisons cette idée en stipulant que les normes sociales contiennent une injonction à ne pas agir de façon rationnelle. L’article commence par une étude des motivations qui sous-tendent le conformisme aux normes sociales, y compris le “conformisme hypocrite”, qui est un conformisme rationnel déguisé en conformisme désintéressé. Nous présentons ensuite une critique du modèle de l’“économie de l’estime”. Dans la troisième partie, nous introduisons le concept d’“équilibre hypocrite”, où la plupart des agents font semblant de se conformer de manière désintéressée tout en ignorant délibérément les comportements semblables d’autrui. Ce genre d’équilibre se maintient par la recherche d’estime et l’illusion sur soi-même. Dans la quatrième partie, nous appliquons notre modèle aux normes régissant le duel, et nous concluons avec un survol de modèles alternatifs. Notre but est de montrer que, dans le champ normatif, prendre les motivations au sérieux peut nous offrir des explications que les modèles rationnels stricts ne peuvent donner.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it