Norms-like Patterns

Does normative guidance require normative attitudes?

Normative Attitudes

Some researchers characterise norms in such a way that normative guidance requires normative attitudes by definition. For example:

‘norms are characterized by general acceptance of particular normative principles within the group in question.’ (Brennan, Eriksson, Goodin, & Southwood, 2013, p. 94)

Bicchieri offers a theory that allows for normative guidance by habits. However, Bicchieri’s envisaged role for habits is conditional on their functioning in ways that, on her account, amount to attitudes controlling behaviors (Bicchieri, 2005, p. 6). As she puts it: normative behaviors must be under the control of attitudes in the less demanding sense that if the attitudes were to change, the behaviors would ‘at once be overridden and abandoned’ (Bicchieri, 2005, p. 51).

Brennan et al. (2013, p. 28ff) trace their idea back to Hart’s distinction between rules and habits:

‘How does a habit [mere pattern in behaviour] differ from a rule? ... A social rule has an ‘internal’ aspect ... there should be a critical reflective attitude to certain patterns of behaviour as a common standard ... this should display itself in criticism (including self-criticism), demands for conformity, and in acknowledgements ..., all of which find their characteristic expression in the normative terminology of ‘ought’’ (Hart, 1994, pp. 55–7)

Normative Regularities and implicit Normative Behaviours

Other researchers characterise social norms in ways that do not involve attitudes at all. For example, Westra & Andrews (2022) define a ‘normative regularity’ as ‘a socially maintained pattern of behavioral conformity within a community.’ This is helpful because it suggests we can characterise normative phenomena in a way that leaves open for discovery questions about which mechanisms are responsible for them.

Heyes (2024) proposes a notion of ‘implicit normative behaviours’ which involve compliance and enforcement but, unlike their explicit counterparts, do not involve commentary. Her key insight is that such implicit normative behaviours can be a consequence of refinforcement learning and do not require normative attitudes.

Despite these virtues, neither approach seems well-suited to understanding normative guidance as it stands because there do not appear to be non-instrumental reasons to conform to normative regularities nor to maintain implicit normative behaviours.

As first step to characterising a form of normative guidance require normative attitudes, consider the notion of a norm-like pattern.

Norm-Like Patterns

An act of rewarding, punishing or signaling compliance is normatively catalytic just if there is a pattern of behaviour which the act contributes to upholding.

A norm-like pattern is a pattern of behaviour which exists because

1. there are normatively catalytic actions concerning this pattern; and

2. some or all of these actions have the collective goal of upholding this pattern.

Where there are norm-like patterns, we can ask which mechanisms are responsible for the normatively catalytic actions.

A special case of norm-like patterns are those where the normatively catalytic actions are driven by normative attitudes. These patterns count as norms in the sense Hart (1994) and others focus on.

But there are also norm-like patterns where the normatively catalytic actions are driven by more basic mechanisms. including reinforcement learning.

Collective Goals

The notion of a norm-like pattern requires that of a collective goal. What are collective goals?

A goal is an outcome to which one or more actions are directed. Someone might say, for example, ‘the goal of our actions is to free Nelson Mandela.’ Note that a goal is not an intention, nor any mental state of the agents. (At least, not usually.) The freedom of Nelson Mandela is not a mental state of those who ensured his freedom.

An outcome is a collective goal of two or more actions involving multiple agents if it is an outcome to which those actions are directed where this is not, or not only, a matter of each action being directed to the outcome.

Can you give sufficient conditions for there to be a collective goal? Yes!

If there is a single outcome, G, such that

1. Our actions are coordinated; and
2. coordination of this type would normally increase the probability that G occurs.

then there is an outcome to which our actions are directed where this is not, or not only, a matter of each action being directed to that outcome, i.e. our actions have a collective goal.

Background on Interspecies Norm-like Patterns

‘Trophobiotic interactions involve the consumption of a food reward, often in return for protection from natural enemies. For ant-loving hemipterans, caterpillars, and most plants, these rewards almost invariably involve a sugary and/or nutrient-rich liquid, one that is collected by the foragers that patrol the area surrounding the resource ... Highly specialized ant-plants (myrmecophytes) offer additional food rewards and provide ants with a domicile.’ (Ness, Mooney, & Lach, 2010, p. 99)

Minimal Normative Guidance

The notion of a norm-like pattern does not, by itself, involve anything normative. Here we face a dilemma:

Insofar as a norm-like pattern is merely a result of natural selection, or of reinforcement learning, there is no reason why anyone should conform to the pattern. Insofar as a norm-like pattern is driven by normative attitudes, there is a clear sense in which normative guidance is involved, but this is exactly not what we are looking for.

How could upholding a pattern be a collective goal of our actions other than through natural selection, mere reinforcement learning, explicit intentions or normative attitudes?

Observation: violations of ethical norms can cause feelings such as bitterness, disgust or social pain, and such feelings can also influence ethically-relevant behaviours and evaluations.^[1]

These effects, although significant and often replicable, are small (Landy & Goodwin, 2015; Chapman, 2018; Piazza, Landy, Chakroff, Young, & Wasserman, 2018; Giner-Sorolla, Kupfer, & Sabo, 2018), vary from person to person in ways we do not understand (Tracy, Steckler, & Heltzel, 2019, p. e.g.), and are culturally mediated (Terrizzi, Shook, & Ventis, 2010, p. e.g.).

Here is a conjecture:

Disgust, bitterness, social pain and other feelings function to enable us to create patterns of behaviour, which are thereby norm-like.

Where norm-like patterns are the result of feelings like these, and if these feelings really do exist in part because they enable us to create norm-like patterns, they they provide a form of normative guidance.

This is not the same form of normative guidance provided by attitudes (as when we all agree that we should follow a rule about not stealing each other’s chocolate). But it is a form of normative guidance in this sense: where our coordination on what is bitter or disgusting or socially painful results in a norm-like pattern we impose on ourselves, it can be reasonable for us judge that we should conform to a norm-like pattern even without knowing why we should.

Metacognitive Feelings

Examples include the feeling of familiarity (Whittlesea & Williams, 1998; Scott & Dienes, 2008), of knowing (Koriat, 2000), and of being the agent of an event (Haggard & Chambon, 2012).

Koriat’s theory:

‘metacognitive feelings are mediated by the implicit application of nonanalytic heuristics [... which] operate below full consciousness, relying on a variety of cues [... and] affect metacognitive judgments by influencing subjective experience itself’ (Koriat, 2000, p. 158; see also Koriat, 2007, pp. 313--5).

Metacognitive feelings typically arise from processes which monitor cognitive fluency, although the strength of feeling tends to be linked to how unexpected the fluency (or its lack) is. For example, the strongest feeling of familiarity is obtained from faces which are easy to process but difficult to identify explicitly (Whittlesea & Williams, 1998).

As this suggests, metacognitive feelings involve interpretation. Further, it is possible to learn a novel interpretation for a metacognitive feeling. For example, Wan, Dienes, & Fu (2008) trained participants to use familiarity in deciding whether a stimulus is from that grammar