The Evolution of Social Norms: A Perspective from the Legal Academy

Abstract

Aware that law and social norms are complexly intertwined, legal scholars have begun to peek inside the black box of cultural change. Methodological individualists see a social norm as emerging not from a collective decision by an informal group, but rather from the purposive interactions of the group's individual members. This essay presents a semi-rigorous model in which a new norm arises out of the workings of a market for norms. Change is triggered by a shift in either cost-benefit conditions or group composition. Because individuals are heterogeneous in important respects, they respond differently to these triggering events. The first persons to supply new norms generally are individuals who have either superior technical knowledge of cost-benefit conditions, superior social knowledge of group dynamics, or special endowments that provide them with unusually high tangible benefits from norm reform. Members of the social audience observe the competing efforts of these norm suppliers and reward the most meritorious ones by conferring either esteem or, according to a rival theory, new exchange opportunities. Under ideal conditions, members of the audience--the demand side of the market for norms--have no incentive to free-ride in rewarding a worthy norm innovator because they incur no net costs when conferring their rewards.