The Great Illusion: Ignorance, Informational Cascades, and the Persistence of Unpopular Norms

Abstract

Norms of discrimination against women and blacks, norms of revenge still alive in some Mediterranean countries, and norms that everybody dislikes and tries to circumvent, such as the invisible norms of reciprocity that hold among the Iks studied by Turnbull, are all examples of unpopular and inefficient norms that often persist in spite of their being disliked as well as being obviously inefficient from a social or economic viewpoint. From a functionalist viewpoint such norms are anomalous, since they do not seem to fulfill any beneficial role for society at large or even for the social groups involved in sustaining the norm. That rational choice may ensue in suboptimal and even disastrous social outcomes is a well-known tenet of the collective action literature, exemplified by the somewhat simplistic story of the prisoner's dilemma. This article asserts that it is possible and useful to model the dynamics of inefficient or unpopular norms as the product of rational choices made by individuals who misperceive their social environment. The policy conclusion that one draws from the model is that it might take surprisingly modest public interventions to effect major changes in collective behavior.