Many of us have found ourselves in a situation like this: There’s a gathering at your family friend’s place. You refuse to go but have to. You don’t pay much heed to dressing up and put on your hoodie over whatever you were already wearing. Or in the highly unlikely scenario, you are really excited to go to the event and you put your best dress on. In both of these settings your parents are likely to rebuke you for how you present yourself. This reminds me of the time when I was dismissed from a class for wearing shorts. Conventions like appropriately dressing for the environment you are in, are known as norms. Norms are the rules or standards about how members of a community should behave. They define how to behave in accordance with what a society has defined as good, right, and important.
It’s OK to tell a woman you like her shoes. It’s not OK to ask if you can try them on. It’s OK to stand in line behind someone at the ATM. It’s not OK to look over their shoulder as they make their transaction. It’s OK to sit beside someone on a crowded bus. It’s weird to sit beside a stranger in a half-empty bus. Table manners, sportsmanship, using a napkin to clean your face, the use of inside voices at a library, not giving in to your intrusive thoughts of banging someone’s head into a wall ( joke :) ) These are but a few examples of the variety of norms that have proliferated in human cultures.
In every society, the elders bestow these rules to the younger ones. It is not merely the parents that present these norms to their children, it is also the neighbourhood they live in, the media they consume and experiences they are subjected to. Many of the values and beliefs that we have, are formed by these unspoken rules of society. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their culture. For example, in India younger members of the society are expected to touch elders’ feet as a sign of respect whereas in most other Asian cultures a bow implies the same. This ability of societies to adopt differing norms is part of what has let humans develop diverse cultures across the world.
Human societies have fabricated various kinds of norm. Many of them are termed as ‘conventions’ or ‘customs.’ These are standards of behavior that are socially expected but have little to no moral significance. For example, not burping out loud when at the dining table. Then there are norms of morality; you are morally obligated to not litter in public places. Taboos are a form of norm that a culture absolutely forbids, like incest in many cultures. Finally, laws are a form of norm. Laws are a formal body of rules enacted by a society. It is to be duly noted here that this classification is very vague and a norm considered a taboo by some culture may merely be a moral obligation to some.
In nature, there is inter species competition for survival and continuation of one’s specie. What is less often discussed is intra specie competition. Redwood trees are a specie of over 115m tall plants. These are as tall as plants can be since this is approximately the height at which capillary action ceases to work; any taller and a tree cannot get water to its topmost leaves from its roots. But this feat is not easy to achieve. It takes a lot of energy to grow upward and remain standing in the face of wind and gravity. To solve the later problem, these redwoods with shallow roots, cooperate by intertwining their roots for horizontal support. The energy they could have spent to make their roots stronger, they spend in growing taller. There are no other plants in their vicinity that even come close their height. Giving them supreme reign over the amount of sunlight received. If there is no true competition from other species when it comes to receiving sunlight, why do these behemoths bother to be so tall? The answer lies in the fact that they grow in a forest of redwoods. The species’ worst competition is not from any other specie but from itself. The redwood is locked in an evolutionary arms race. The problem with competitive struggles, however, is that they’re enormously wasteful. Redwoods are so much taller than they need to be. If only they could coordinate not to all grow so tall, their energy could be better spent on other purposes, such as giving themselves better roots as individuals. Unfortunately, the redwoods aren’t capable of coordinating to enforce a height cap, and natural selection cannot help them either. Even if they do, it would take a single redwood to grow taller and produce progeny that take major share of the sunlight for themselves and this phenomenon shall cascade, resulting in the redwoods that we see today. But humans are different. Unlike other species and natural processes we can look ahead and coordinate to develop ways to avoid wasteful competition. One of those ways is through norms and norm enforcement.
Do non-human animals have norms? There are various schools of thought on this. A few agree that norms amongst other animals exist, many don’t. Nature is full of physical structures built by animals guided by a template of how the structure ought to look. Non-human primates, as well as many other animals, strive for specific outcomes. They do so both in relation to physical structures, such as nests and webs, and in relation to social relationships. They actively try to preserve harmony within their social network. They frequently correct deviations from this ideal by, e.g., reconciling after conflict, protesting against unequal divisions, and breaking up fights amongst others. They behave normatively in the sense of correcting, or trying to correct, deviations from an ideal state. Even though the norms themselves in non-human animals may not be same, the intention of preserving the ideal state is alike.
By inflicting norms, humans have learned to limit wasteful intra specie competition. The insistent egalitarianism was arguably the world’s first true human norm. Egalitarianism, as it is defined today is the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. However, throughout history the definition of ‘people’ has not stayed consistent. But it is evident that within the same social class this doctrine held true. No man is given a free pass to cut a line in which there are members of the same social class, at least not without causing them moral discomfort. The big strong kid of the class can easily steal the wimpy kid’s lunch. But in human groups, the bully shall then face punishment from rest of the community. Thus collective enforcement is the essence of norms. The strong ones cannot exploit the weak ones lest they be sanctioned by the society. Christopher Boehm calls this a “reverse dominance hierarchy” where instead of the strongest apes dominating the group, in humans it’s the rest of the group, working together that’s able to dominate the strongest apes and keep them effectively in check. This is the conflict Suguru Geto was dealing with. He was bound in a norm of saving the weak from curses that were bred from their own negative intentions and feelings. ‘Why should he?’ is what he asked himself before going rogue. But that’s fiction; in reality, the society is able to keep the strong individuals in check by inflicting norms.
Very much like Suguru, those deviating from norms are often viewed with skepticism. To advocate this let us look at the trial of Amanda Knox.
On the night of November 1, 2007 Meredith Kercher was murdered by Rudy Guede. After very thorough argumentation and investigation, his guilt is a certainty. However we are not here to talk about Guede. The prime suspect of the case in the eyes of media was Meredith’s roommate, Amanda Knox. She came home one morning and found blood in the bathroom. She and her boyfriend called the police and were immediately added to the list of suspects with Guede being added later. There was never any physical evidence linking either Knox or her boyfriend to the crime, whereas the crime scene was littered with Guede’s DNA and the fact that he fled Italy for Germany immediately after the incident, only added to his plausible guilt. Yet it took a ruling by the Italian Supreme Court, eight years after the crime, for Knox to be finally declared innocent. Even then, some experts, media and the general public disagreed. When she was released from the prison, a large angry crowd gathered to protest her release. So, what was wrong with Amanda’s case?
Amanda Knox was a misfit for the society.
As she writes in her memoir, “I was the quirky kid who hung out with the sulky manga-readers, the ostracized gay kids, and the theater geeks.” During high school, “I took Japanese and sang, loudly, in the halls while walking from one class to another. Since I didn’t really fit in, I acted like myself, which pretty much made sure I never did.”. She’d do things that would embarrass most teenagers and adults like walking down the street like an Egyptian or an elephant. However, kids found this behaviour of her’s hilarious.
Meredith’s murder changed the way her circle of friends behaved. They wept, hushed their voices, murmured their sympathies. Amanda didn’t. On the day after murder, when their friends came to the police station, one of them hugged Amanda, she didn’t hug back. There was no trace of emotion on her face. After a while, she sat with her feet resting on her boyfriend’s lap, the two caressed and kissed each other; sometimes they’d even laugh. One of the friends uttered, “Let’s hope she didn’t suffer”; to this Amanda exclaimed, “What do you think? They cut her throat, Natalie. She fucking bled to death!”
While waiting to be interviewed by police, four days after Meredith’s body was discovered, Knox decided to stretch. She’d been sitting, slumped, for hours. The policeman on duty remarked “You seem really flexible.”; to this she replied, “I used to do a lot of yoga.” He asked her what else she can do. She took a few steps toward the elevator and did a split. The lead investigator in the case mentioned that he had doubts about Amanda from the moment she walked with him through the crime scene. As she put on protective boots, she swiveled her hips and said, “Ta-dah.”
We can clearly see why Amanda was seen as the culprit in Meredith’s murder. She did not conform to the norms and standards for behavior set by society when one experiences murder of someone known. But in the light, she was a victim of hatred by those who expected certain behavior from her, us as a society.
Many of us have felt an angst developed by the dissonance in wanting to do something a certain way and simultaneously considering a norm to be the correct way of doing it. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs. Let us consider the case of individuals who are vegetarian because of religious reasons, but do wish to consume non-vegetarian food either for nutritional gains or because they have accepted carnivorous behaviour of homo-sapiens. The norm bestowed upon them does not allow them to partake in killing of animals, but their rational acceptance of the carnivorous behaviour causes them discomfort.
As we grow up as individuals, we are presented with the ways of society, how it functions and what should you do to be acceptable. What happens when you encounter someone from some other culture? We find their ways different; actions acceptable to us may not be acceptable to them. In such situations, conflicts arise. The extent of the conflicts depend on how much these norms differ. With globalisation of ideas, the chances of such encounters has increased exponentially. This has led to, in some cases an intermixing of norms and in some of them huge conflicts over what is right. Differing conventions and customs are easier to accept than differing moral obligations and taboos. However differing their norms may be, societies have seen an adoption of each other into their culture. Norms change. Consider the case of differing sexualities. In many cultures around the world same sex intercourse is regarded with contempt. However, this is changing. Societies are accepting the ways of LGBTQIA+ community. This presents a case against norms being the ultimate truth.
Humans have developed a wide variety of norms to constrain individual behaviour. Many of these, like the norms against murder, rape, assault are very strongly enforced but there is a certain class of norms that their violations are so subtle that we often don’t notice them even when we do it ourselves. These are crimes of intent. If you just happen to be friendly with someone else’s spouse, no big deal. But if you’re friendly with romantic or sexual intentions, that is considered inappropriate. By targeting intentions (which are only inside the actor’s head) rather than actions (that everyone can clearly see) society gives itself a way to skirt and subvert these norms.
But this is due for another story … of how we cheat.
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Note: A few key ideas presented here draw from the book ‘The Elephant in the Brain’ by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, various independent articles and researches, while others stem from my own thoughts and insights.