New research: Tradition trumps payoffs in maintaining social norms in some situations
Derung laborers from three households and their helpers are preparing the land to co-farm in 2020. Photo by Minhua Yan
New research by evolutionary anthropologists is redefining what we thought we knew about human behavior, specifically social norms and how we may be able to change them in the future.
Social norms are the unwritten rules people follow in public without even consciously thinking about it. Shaking hands, saying hello, feeling required to tip at the local coffee shop — in fear of what the person behind the counter may think if you don’t.
These are just some examples of social norms. They've been studied by different disciplines for decades, explained Sarah Mathew, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University.
“Humans are the only species that scientists can confidently say have social norms — in the sense that there are shared expectations among a group of people about what's right and what's not right,” said Mathew, a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
“We follow the norm because we think others expect us to do that, and we think that others will think badly of us, even socially sanction us if we don’t,” she said. “At least that is what dominant theories of social norms assume.”
However, evolutionary anthropologist Minhua Yan, an ASU alumna, has conducted a new study with Mathew and ASU evolutionary anthropologist Robert Boyd that shows sometimes people follow norms not because they worry about what others will think, but because they care about sticking with tradition.
The study, “A norm about harvest division is maintained by a desire to follow tradition, not by social policing,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges a widely held assumption about social norms and reveals the importance of tradition bias.
The Derung
In southwestern China on the border of Myanmar, there is a community of subsistence farmers called the Derung. The community co-farms, and the harvest is divided equally among the households that contributed laborers, regardless of how many laborers they contributed.
“So, say that you're a household, and I'm a household,” Yan said. “Your household has two laborers; my household has only one laborer. Every time we go to work, two people from your household go, and only one from mine. However, we would still divide the crops 50/50.”
Yan, an alumna of the Institute of Human Origins and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, learned about the Derung community on national news. They were one of the last villages in China to be connected by the Chinese road system in 2006, but even then, the road to their village would be blocked by snow for half a year. It wasn’t until 2015 that the Chinese government replaced part of the road with a new tunnel.
“This infrastructure allowed additional opportunities, like wage labor and the ability to run businesses and sell to the outside market, or to accommodate tourists,” Yan said. “As a result, the time a laborer spends co-farming is more costly than it used to be.”
Because Yan’s research is about documenting norm changes, she wanted to see if this new infrastructure, with possible new opportunities, would change the harvest-division norms of the Derung from one in which each household got an equal share to one in which each laborer was given an equal share.
What she discovered was surprising: Although they would prefer to divide the harvest equally among the laborers, and they know that others too would prefer it, and they know that no one will think poorly of them if they do it — they continue to split the harvest equally among households.
“They chose to follow the norm not because it suited the ecology, or because they thought it was morally right, or because they expected others to evaluate norm followers positively, but because it was their tradition and most other villagers followed it,” Yan said.
Finding out what people really want
Sometimes, in science, your hypothesis is wrong.
Yan lived with the Derung for 20 months to measure the psychological, economic and social factors influencing how people make decisions about whether to follow a norm. Based on previous theories, she had some reasonable guesses.
Perhaps people believe that it is the right thing to do, and so would feel guilty and bad about themselves if they don’t. Or they believe it provides the highest material returns. Or they expect that they will be socially sanctioned if they do not follow the norm.
“I went into the field site expecting that people follow social norms because it maximizes the combination of these three forms of payoffs,” Yan said. “So I was trying to distinguish which one of the three is the major driving force. I discovered that my assumption was very wrong!
“Instead of any of these three forms of payoffs, people’s desire to follow tradition drove their norm compliance. As one participant explained, ‘What people think is just what people think. When we do things, we do what we have always been doing.’”
Yan used different methods to arrive at these results. She conducted interviews about real-life co-farming relationships and used hypothetical co-farming scenarios to probe people's feelings about various divisions.
She also had community members participate in an “ultimatum game,” an economic experiment in which one player proposes a particular division of a harvest, and the other can either accept or reject the proposal. If rejected, both players don’t receive anything. This increased her confidence that what she found is not a fluke. People’s own preferences and their social expectations suggest they should be switching to the new norm, yet the old norm persists.
While scientists have suspected for a long time that tradition could be more powerful than social consequences, Yan and researchers are the first to demonstrate this in a very clear way.
“This finding fits into a hallmark trait of humans — unlike other species, we rely heavily on information accumulated by previous generations,” Mathew said. “While this can make us slow to adapt to new circumstances, it also spares each generation from reinventing the wheel.”
The authors said one of the most useful things about this study is that it helps us know what we should be doing if we want to change social norms. Changing the social norms in some situations is going to require a different approach from the changing of ideas now that tradition bias can play such an important role.
“Even though we face different social problems and different kinds of social influences, we are all sensitive to social influences,” Yan said. “So by looking at how people from another cultural group decide what to do, and realizing that a disliked norm persists there due to people’s tradition bias, now we know that we must overcome this bias if we want to establish a new norm — for example, to encourage people to travel more sustainably.”
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