The Emperor's Dilemma: Popular Enforcement of Unpopular Norms

为什么要执行规范？根据功能主义的解释，规范对整个社会都是有用的，而理性选择理论则认为规范对那些执行它们的人是有用的。“皇帝的困境”提出了另一种可能性--一个群体的成员可能会以很少（如果有的话）群体成员实际想要或需要的方式强制履行义务。这种流行的强制执行不受欢迎的规范的常见例子从喜剧到悲剧都有：对一位享有很高声望但难以理解的学者的奉承崇拜（其辉煌的新思想大概无法理解的知识分子轻量级）;“政治不正确”的谴责肯定了道德地位的那些人是足够的愤怒;那些私下里希望和平但却报复的人维持着螺旋式的冲突，因为他们认为这是“光荣的”，是对他们的期望。对“多元无知”和“透明幻觉”的研究表明，我们有时高估了对社会规范的支持。人们是否不仅在公开场合遵守私下里不受欢迎的规范，而且还执行这些规范，这一点尚未得到探讨。我们的假设是，个人执行他们私下质疑的规范，以寻求社会认可;因此，他们通过公开展示虚假的诚意来掩饰自己的真实观点。 这种“真诚的幻觉”是否足以使一个群体陷入一种社会平衡，在这种平衡中，不受欢迎的规范被普遍执行？哪些因素增加了这种社会陷阱的可能性？我们计划使用博弈论，基于代理的建模和实验室实验来开发和测试自我执行规范的动态模型。需要形式理论来仔细解开由强制执行的规范所构成的同义反复结-不是因为对他人遵守的兴趣-而是因为强制执行决定产生的社会压力。 需要一个正式的模型来研究这些动态，并确定种群陷入这种平衡的过程，以及它可能逃脱的过程。然后，我们将使用实验室实验在受控条件下测试理论提出的假设。

Why are norms enforced? According to functionalist accounts, norms are useful to society at large, while rational choice theory suggests that norms are useful to those who enforce them. The "Emperor's Dilemma" suggests an alternative possibility -- that members of a group may enforce obligations to act in ways that few if any group members actually want or need. Familiar examples of this popular enforcement of unpopular norms range from the comic to the tragic: fawning admiration for a highly prestigious but incomprehensible scholar (whose brilliant new ideas presumably cannot be grasped by intellectual lightweights); the "politically incorrect" whose censure affirms the moral standing of those who are sufficiently indignant; spiraling conflicts sustained by those who privately wish for peace but retaliate because they think it is "honorable" and expected of them. Research on "pluralistic ignorance" and the "illusion of transparency" shows that we sometimes overestimate support for social norms. What remains unexplored is whether people not only publicly comply with privately unpopular norms but also enforce these norms. Our hypothesis is that individuals enforce norms that they privately question in order to seek social approval; thus they camouflage their true opinions by public displays of false sincerity. Is this "illusion of sincerity" sufficient to trap a population in a social equilibrium in which unpopular norms are popularly enforced? What factors increase the likelihood of this social trap? We plan to use game theory, agent-based modeling, and laboratory experiments to develop and test a dynamic model of self-enforcing norms. Formal theory is needed to carefully disentangle the tautological knot posed by norms that are enforced -- not because of an interest in others' compliance -- but because of the very social pressure that enforcement decisions produce. A formal model is needed to investigate these dynamics and to identify the processes by which a population comes to be trapped in this equilibrium and by which it might escape. We will then use laboratory experiments to test under controlled conditions the hypotheses suggested by the theory.