Norms

This, to me, is the principal lesson of the last 10 years from US governance. The story and data in this paper are based in Singapore, but the lessons are universal. Social norms are critical, but if you grow reliant on them absent any formal enforcement, corruption will eventually take root. There are just too many people who figure out that the concept of “being in trouble” isn’t real. If transgressions do not receive instrumental punishments beyond social shaming and reputational damage, then individuals will simply find institutional and social pockets to inhabit where that shame doesn’t reach and a negative reputation might even be viewed as an asset by other would-be corrupt agents.

Read this paper (I mean, at least skim it) and internalize its core observations. This is important.

I’m reading The Property Species by Bart Wilson. I like chapter 4 “What is Right is Not Taken Out of the Rule, but Let the Rule Arise Out of What Is Right,” partly because I got to play a small part in this line of research.

Along with several coauthors, Bart Wilson has run experiments in which players have the ability to make and consume goods. According to the instructions that all players read at the beginning of the experiment, “when the clock expires… you earn cash based upon the number of red and blue items that have been moved to your house.”

Property norms can emerge in these environments, and sometimes subjects take goods from each other in an action that could be called “stealing.” The experimental instructions do not contain any morally loaded words like “stealing,” but subjects use that word to describe the activities of their counterparts.

Here is a conversation from the transcript of the chat room players can use to communicate while they produce and trade digital goods:

E: do you want to do this right way?

F: wht is the right way

E: the right way is I produce red you make blue then we split it nobody gets 100 percent profit but we both win

F: tht wht I been doing then u started stealing

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