Norms in the Evolution of Social Order

norms occupy a crucial place in theories of social order. in this article, I discuss some of the contributions and limits of norms with respect to the evolution of social order. The problem of social order—that is, the attainment of cooperation among large numbers of individuals—is fundamental to disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology to economics, psychology, political science, sociology, and anthropology. No one can adequately represent the various approaches to this problem that are taken in all these disciplines. In what follows, I sketch out and assess what I consider to be the main explanations currently at play.

THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL ORDER

Social order holds to the extent that the actions of multiple individuals within a system generate collectively beneficial outcomes (Hechter and Horne 2009). The distinction between individuals—however these are defined—and those of the systems they comprise can be made for all forms of life. Given this distinction, the possibility that individual action may compromise, if not wholly undermine, order in the entire system cannot be ignored. Conflict between individual parts and the whole arises across multiple domains and levels of organization. In multicellular life forms, cancer cells sometimes emerge and threaten the organism’s survival (Aktipis et al. 2015). Among some honeybees and wasps, female workers can attempt to reproduce, but successful reproduction by workers, rather than the queen, can destabilize the entire colony (Foster and Ratnieks 2001). Among humans, the free-rider problem is one of the key obstacles to collective action (Olson 1965).¹

The tension between the part and the whole has long been a central concern of theorists of social order, at least since the time of Plato. E. O. Wilson (1975) held that the conditions under which individuals sacrifice their own fitness to promote that of others is the fundamental problem of sociobiology. Talcott Parsons (1937) considered the attainment of social order to be the most important sociological problem. Elinor Ostrom (2007) regarded the theory of collective action as the central problem of political science. The evolution of cooperation has also intrigued anthropologists, social psychologists, and economists. If opportunistic behavior can threaten the survival of collectives across all life forms, then all viable collectives must have some means of discouraging it.

There are two basic modern approaches to understanding the evolution of social order among large numbers of individuals. The first approach, popular among evolutionary biologists and some social scientists, emphasizes self-organization (Anzola, Barbrook-Johnson, and Cano 2016) and employs invisible-hand explanations (Nozick 1974). In this view, cooperation emerges spontaneously and unintentionally among self-interested individuals in the absence of centralized direction and control. By contrast, the second view argues that social order is produced by establishing a collective enforcement mechanism to deter opportunistic behavior.

INVISIBLE-HAND THEORIES OF SOCIAL ORDER

The most dramatic example of spontaneous, self-organizing order found in nature is the immune system. This system has evolved to attack noncooperative alien invaders within individual organisms. But immunity can also be found between individuals. Thus, individuals in ant societies systematically attack destructive parasites and dispose of infected ants in their midst, all in the absence of any central directives (Cremer, Armitage, and Schmid-Hempel 2007). The highest level of social order in the animal kingdom is found not in humans but in the social insects. Indeed, among some ant species, individual foragers are highly self-sacrificing, suffering a death rate of 6 percent per hour when they hunt for food (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009). Some primates use policing to deter free riding (Flack et al. 2006; Langergraber et al. 2017), and general deterrence theory is a lodestar of much research in criminology (Matsueda, Kreager, and Huizinga 2006).

Since large-scale self-organized cooperation exists in the animal kingdom, this fact has posed a great explanatory challenge to evolutionary biologists. They regard the attainment of social order as puzzling because, as Charles Darwin (1874, chap. 5) appreciated long ago, evolution would seem to favor the survival of self-interested individuals rather than altruists who sacrifice their own resources to help others. This led Darwin to believe that...