The Emperor's Dilemma: Popular Enforcement of Unpopular Norms

为什么要强制执行规范？根据功能主义的描述，规范对整个社会是有用的，而理性选择理论则表明，规范对那些执行规范的人是有用的。“皇帝的困境”暗示了另一种可能性--一个团体的成员可以执行义务，以极少的团体成员真正想要或需要的方式行事。这种普遍执行不受欢迎的规范的常见例子从喜剧到悲剧不一而足：对一位声名显赫但令人费解的学者(其杰出的新思想大概无法被知识分子的轻量级人物理解)的奉承钦佩；对那些足够愤慨的人的谴责肯定了他们的道德地位的“政治不正确”；那些私下里希望和平但进行报复的人持续不断的冲突，因为他们认为和平是“光荣的”，并被期待着这样做。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。仍未探讨的是，人们是否不仅公开遵守私下不受欢迎的规范，而且还强制执行这些规范。我们的假设是，个人强制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盖自己的真实观点。这种“真诚的幻觉”是否足以让人们陷入一种社会平衡中，在这种社会平衡中，不受欢迎的规范被普遍执行？是什么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实施规范的动态模型。需要正式的理论来仔细地解开被执行的规范构成的同义反复的结--不是因为对他人遵守的利益--而是因为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，并确定一个种群被困在这种平衡中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该理论提出的假说。

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.