The Rewards of Punishment

A Relational Theory of Norm Enforcement

Christine Horne

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804771221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

The Rewards of Punishment describes a new social theory of norms to provide a compelling explanation why people punish. Identifying mechanisms that link interdependence with norm enforcement, it reveals how social relationships lead individuals to enforce norms, even when doing so makes little sense. This groundbreaking book tells the whole story, from ideas, to experiments, to real-world applications. In addition to addressing longstanding theoretical puzzles—such as why harmful behavior is not always punished, why individuals enforce norms in ways that actually hurt the group, why people enforce norms that benefit others rather than themselves, why groups punish behavior that has only trivial effects, and why atypical behaviors are sometimes punished and sometimes not—it explores the implications of the theory for substantive issues, including norms regulating sex, crime, and international human rights.

1 The Problem

FOR CENTURIES, WOMEN IN CHINA PRACTICED FOOTBINDING. Footbinding involved folding the foot of a young girl under itself and wrapping it tightly with bandages. The result was that the foot grew to be no more than a few inches long. Women with bound feet were unable to walk normally. They experienced pain and complications, including gangrene, amputation, and even death. Despite these damaging effects, women perpetuated the practice, making sure that their daughters’ feet were bound. Footbinding was almost universal among the Chinese and persisted for hundreds of years. Numerous reform efforts failed. Laws against footbinding did nothing to discourage it. Efforts by Western missionaries to inform the Chinese of world opinion about the practice had no effect. But then—in one of the greatest social transformations of the twentieth century—footbinding disappeared in a single generation (Mackie 1996, 2006). Why, given its painful and damaging effects and the efforts to stop it, was the practice of footbinding so widespread and so prolonged? And how, after all the failed efforts, was it finally eliminated?

Modern Western societies typically try to solve social problems using one of three tools: government, with its power to penalize problematic behavior; market incentives, with their ability to motivate productive activity; and education and the internalization of appropriate values. None of these approaches, however, accounts for the demise of footbinding. Laws failed to stop the practice. There is no evidence that markets affected it. And education efforts had little impact. None of the strategies upon which modern societies typically rely explains the persistence and demise of footbinding.

What does? In the late 1800s, British romance novelist Mrs. Archibald Little moved with her new husband to China. More than other British wives, she sought to understand the people around her (Croll 1990; Little 1899). Little became very concerned about the practice of footbinding. She traveled through China studying the practice and the attempts to end it. At one point in her travels, she came across a small community in which the residents had pledged not to bind their daughters’ feet and had promised that their sons would marry natural-footed women. Consistent with that pledge, the residents did not practice footbinding. Little recognized the significance of what the community had accomplished. Its example stimulated the creation of Anti-Footbinding Societies in which members made the same promise (Mackie 2006). These societies led to the end of footbinding. They worked because they greatly reduced the negative social consequences of unbound feet. Those earlier social pressures had been strong. Girls whose feet were not bound risked remaining single. But once Anti-Footbinding Societies existed, mothers no longer needed to fear for the futures of daughters with unbound feet. Norms mandating footbinding dissolved. The practice disappeared.

This success story points to a potential source of solutions for intractable social challenges. The failure of governments and markets to solve a number of serious contemporary problems highlights a need for additional tools. Mrs. Little stumbled across a solution implemented by Chinese villagers—a solution that recognized the power of social norms. Norms may also be useful for addressing problems here and now. However, to proactively take advantage of them, we must understand them.

A challenge for anyone trying to understand norms is to determine exactly what they are. Whereas the concept is one of the most widely used in the social sciences, there is little consensus about what norms are and how they emerge. Scholars disagree about the essential elements that constitute a norm. To complicate matters, a variety of other concepts—custom, role, institution, law, value, moral, behavioral regularity, and so forth—are similar to or overlap in significant ways with norms.

I rely on a definition that incorporates elements that many (though not all) scholars view as essential. I define norms as rules, about which there is some degree of consensus, that are socially enforced. Norms may have an internal component. That is, they may define individuals’ values and worldviews. They may also be related to patterns of behavior. But while they may overlap with internalized values and behavioral regularities, those features are not unique to norms. Instead, I take the position that social sanctions distinguish norms from other related concepts. Sanctions are an essential element of norms. This does not mean that sanctions are the only things that need an explanation if we want to understand norms, but they are an essential thing to explain. If we cannot explain norm enforcement, then we will not understand norms.

In this book, therefore, I focus on explaining social sanctions. Even narrowing the problem to enforcement (rather than norms in their totality) leaves a range of complicated issues. I do not claim to address them all. Rather, I isolate a small number of key causal factors and mechanisms that are not well understood. Specifically, I link a characteristic of social relations (the interdependence of individuals) to sanctioning. The resulting relational theory of norm enforcement sheds light on a number of theoretical puzzles:

• If a behavior is wrong or harmful, why is it sometimes punished and sometimes not?
• Why do people enforce norms that benefit others rather than themselves?
• Why do we see groups enforce norms far more than makes sense—so much so that they actually harm the group?
• Why do people punish nonconsequential behavior—behavior that has only trivial, if any, effects?
• Why do people sometimes sanction atypical behavior and at other times do nothing?

Theoretical Perspectives on Norms

My approach to understanding norm enforcement builds on and complements existing research. Dominant approaches to thinking about norms focus on the characteristics of the normative act. Each emphasizes a different feature of behavior as important—its consequences for community members, the meaning attached to it, or its frequency. These approaches vary in the extent to which they explicitly address the enforcement problem, and none provides a complete explanation. Nonetheless, each suggests insights that have implications for understanding sanctioning.

The Consequentialist Approach

Behavior consequences approaches hold that norms emerge in response to problematic actions. Early functionalist explanations tended simply to assume the emergence of welfare-enhancing norms. More recent interestbased approaches seek to explain how instrumental individuals manage to produce them.

The standard instrumental argument is that when an individual does something, his behavior does not necessarily affect only him. It may also affect the people around him. Those behavior consequences create a demand for norms (Coleman 1990; see also Demsetz 1967). People who are affected by the behavior would like it to be controlled; they have an interest in regulating it (Heckathorn 1988, 1989). That interest leads them to react negatively to harmful behavior or positively to cooperative actions. Everyone benefits from such sanctioning.

Antismoking norms provide evidence of this dynamic (Ellickson 2001). Americans used to think that smoking was acceptable, even cool. Famed CBS news anchor Edward R. Murrow was shown smoking during his broadcasts. Movie stars smoked on screen. But, eventually, people began hearing about studies showing that secondhand smoke caused lung damage. Smoking was not just the smoker’s business anymore. People began reacting negatively to it. Now we hear much more criticism than defense of smoking—because we recognize the dangers.

Smoking is a specific behavior that hurts bystanders. A more general category of behavior that affects others is free-riding. Free-riding occurs in social dilemma situations—those in which the interests of individuals are at odds with those of the group. Such dilemmas are common in social life. For example, any individual might prefer not to make the effort to go to the polls on a cold, rainy night, but if everyone stays home to eat dinner, voter turnout is low and democracy is diminished. Norms researchers identify such social dilemmas in the field, or design studies that create them, and then observe the norms that emerge. They find that, as expected, people punish free-riders (see, for example, Fehr and Gächter 2002; Yamagishi 1986, 1988). Individual pursuit of self-interest in social dilemma situations is theoretically analogous to many specific, concrete behaviors.¹ Just as people react negatively to free-riding and smoking, they will react to other behaviors that have consequences for them.

This argument suggests that as the consequences of a behavior become larger, people’s interest in regulating it becomes stronger. They will be more concerned about stopping murder than minor theft. They will be more worried about teenagers getting drunk and driving than about moderate social drinking around the dinner table. We would, therefore, expect stronger punishments to be directed against more damaging behavior (Yamagishi 1988). The benefits of punishing deviance (including the cessation of the harmful act) motivate people to sanction. The larger those potential benefits are relative to the costs, the more sanctioning occurs (Ostrom 1990).

There is a caveat to this argument, however. Rational individuals would presumably prefer to benefit from reductions in harmful behavior without having to make the effort to sanction themselves. They would prefer to avoid the costs—possible retaliation, time, energy, and so forth. They are tempted to free-ride on others’ sanctioning efforts. They hope that someone else will ask the smoker at the next table to stop. They hope that someone else will confront the person who cut into line. They hope that someone else will do something about the sugary snacks handed out at their child’s day-care center. Because norm enforcement is costly to the individual, but provides benefits to many, it is problematic.

To explain why people punish despite the temptation to do nothing, some researchers have turned to psychological traits. They have found evidence that many people have an innate tendency to react negatively to free-riding (Fehr and Gintis 2007; Gintis et al. 2005). Laboratory experiments have shown that people get angry. Their anger can motivate them to punish despite the costs (Fehr and Gächter 2002). Further, people actually feel good when they punish (Knutson 2004).

Psychological traits differ across individuals and can produce variation in sanctioning. For example, people who do not trust others will support sanctioning systems more than those who do (Yamagishi 1986). Some individuals are more inclined to cooperate than others—cooperating if they expect that others will reciprocate and sanctioning antisocial behavior (Fehr and Gintis 2007) .²

Whatever the psychological trait of interest in a particular study, in general, approaches that focus on the consequences of behavior suggest that the damaging nature of an action triggers reactions to it.³ The implication of this view is that norms encourage individuals to cooperate rather than pursue their own self-interest at the expense of the group.⁴ Norms enhance group welfare.

But such a view is inconsistent with reality. Norms do not always benefit the group. Sometimes they regulate behaviors that appear to have no consequences at all (fashion in men’s ties, for example, or the color of their belts and shoes). And sometimes norms mandate harmful behavior rather than discourage it, as in the case of footbinding.

The Meanings Approach

In part for this reason, many argue that a focus on the consequences of behavior alone is inadequate. One must also examine the meaning of a behavior (see, for example, Fine 2001). These scholars point to instances in which actors do things that make no sense if we consider only the objective outcomes—situations in which consequences alone do not fully explain behavior. Footbinding is only one such destructive practice. Norms of revenge (Elster 1990), rate-busting by workers (Elster 1989), and downward-leveling norms in some ethnic and socioeconomic groups (Portes 1998; Willis 1981) are other examples. It is not only individuals who appear to ignore outcomes—businesses and governments do as well. Countries, for example, may create educational systems that are out of sync with the work lives of their citizens, requiring agricultural workers to study fractions or rural villagers to learn about chemical reactions (Meyer et al. 1997; Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992).

Pointing to such examples, meanings scholars argue that our explanations will be improved if we consider not only a “logic of consequences” but also a “logic of appropriateness” (March and Olsen 1998; Risse 2000). In addition to (or instead of) weighing the possible costs and benefits of an action, people consider whether it is the right thing to do. Shared meanings become part of how they see the world and, in turn, affect their behavior. On this view, Chinese mothers had their daughters’ feet bound because they felt that such behavior was appropriate. Footbinding was taken for granted; it was something that good Chinese families did. Once the practice was established, people had a hard time imagining anything different.

The Creation of Shared Meaning Scholars seek to explain how these shared meanings emerge. They argue that human beings are active participants in creating their world (Berger and Luckmann 1967). People interact and negotiate to produce views of behavior. They may rely on understandings drawn from previous experience (Dobbin 1994; Rydgren 2007). They may engage in discussions in which they try to determine the “right thing” (Risse 2000). They may negotiate conflicts of interest (Fine 2001) and conflicts over meaning (Graham 2003). They may try to justify choices in a world of conflicting norms (Fine 2001).

Many scholars pay attention to these interaction and negotiation processes. Research suggests that children learn the meaning of friendship in the course of interacting with playmates (Davies 1982; Rizzo 1989, 105), and adolescents develop interpretations of events and establish routines unique to their group (Everhart 1983; Fine 1987; Willis 1981). Researchers interested in social movements describe framing processes and the negotiation of common identities (Cohen 1985, 707; Hunt, Benford, and Snow 1994; Johnston, Larana, and Gusfield 1994; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996, 6). Political scientists study the construction of norms against torture and other human rights abuses in the international arena (Finnemore 1996a, 1996b; Hawkins 2004). Across a range of substantive issues, interaction and negotiation are widely seen as important for explaining the development of shared meaning.

Shared Meaning Affects Behavior These shared meanings in turn are thought to affect behavior. Empirical studies seek to provide evidence of such effects.

For example, in the international arena, substantial amounts of research demonstrate that countries that are integrated into the world system are more likely to behave like other countries than those that are isolated. The assumption is that integrated nations have notions of what is appropriate that are consistent with world norms, and they behave accordingly. For example, such research finds that national welfare systems result from countries’ involvement in intergovernmental organizations (Thomas and Lauderdale 1988). Purchases of military weapons reflect the meanings associated with particular military hardware and do not necessarily serve national security needs (Eyre and Suchman 1996). Public education programs grow from the symbolic meaning of state-provided education and not so much from the needs of individuals and businesses (Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992). Such findings are taken as evidence that particular practices or ideologies are taken for granted—part of the cognitive frame through which actors see the world. This meaning, in turn, drives behavior.

The mechanisms at work are not completely clear, however (for a relevant discussion, see Scott 1995). Some formulations of the meanings approach explicitly frame it in opposition to consequentialist theories. On this view, people do not rationally weigh the costs and benefits of their behavior. Rather, they internalize meanings and identities. Their sense of their identity and what is appropriate affects what they do (see, for example, March and Olsen 1998, 951).

Not all meanings scholars reject rational calculations outright. Some see both consequences and meaning as relevant. Many models are additive, showing that after taking consequences into account, meaning improves predictions (Schneiberg 2007). And some appear to acknowledge a role for external sanctions—again suggesting that interests matter. For example, Meyer and Rowan (1977) argue that the taken-for-granted nature of certain rules provides organizations with legitimacy that protects them from sanctions. That legitimacy may be necessary for an organization to survive (Schneiberg and Clemens 2006). Such views imply that actors consider the results of their decisions and that they prefer to avoid negative reactions. Even more explicitly, Powell (1991, 183) criticizes the t...