How to Succeed in Social-Norm-Enforcement Without Really Trying

How do you enforce a rule? 

This is a common problem. Life is full of disputes and full of collective action problems, so many norms have to be enforced. We also have random bad pointless norms but let’s ignore those for today.

In these United States, we have two tricks. First, we have a state. The state consists of a deliberative body with a large pot of money and a near monopoly on violence. The deliberative body hires agents to enforce its will. It also hires agents to sustain itself.

Our second trick is the goodness of our hearts.

But both of those are fragile. History is full of governments being swept in and swept out, and in our hearts, goodness come in limited supply. There’s only so much sympathy and self-denial you can expect, so sympathy can only deal with incidentals.

So what’s a girl to do when she’s a society with a complexly interwoven society subject to unreliable government? That is the question this blog post shall answer.

The answer is that she does ostracism. Lots, and lots, of ostracism. And if things get complicated enough she does a caste system. 

What’s so great about ostracism? In brief, it’s antifragile. In slightly less brief, ostracism is a self-sustaining norm because everyone has to participate in the enforcement and that solidifies a Nash equilibrium with lots of punishing.

In even less brief, read the rest of this post.

The problem that ostracism solves is free ridership on punishment.

For example, I might like that thieves are punished, but not want to make the needed sacrifices to make that happen (paying my taxes). So, we also need to enforce the rule that taxes are paid (we need IRS agents), and we also need to enforce the rule that we enforce the rule that taxes are paid (we need managers ensuring good work product from IRS agents), and we need to enforce the rule that we enforce the rule that…

… Infinite Regress!

In the US, we escape this regress by all voting for good candidates. Voting, and researching for whom to vote, is irrational, and a selfish person would not do it, but alhamdulillah we all do it anyway and it makes government agents do their jobs.

How does ostracism escape this infinite regress? It’s actually super cool and clever how. Ostracism is a punishment where it’s obvious if anyone has failed to enforce it, and it’s easy for people to punish the non-enforcers.

Why? For most of history everyone lived in tight villages, so you can see whether someone isn’t participating in the ostracism. You just look who’s visiting which house. Plus, you don’t need to make a checklist of who’s done the punishment and who hasn’t. The default is punishing because the default is not interacting. You only need to watch to see if someone “breaks”.

As long as you have a notion of, “pollution”, that non-ostracizers must be ostracized themselves, then everyone enforcing every rule is a Nash equilibrium. 

Let’s be pedantic and look at the math. Assume the utility of person p follows the following equation:

    U_p = Σ_i=1ⁿ U(p,i)*C(i,p)

Where:

• there are n people in the community
• U(p,i) is how much pleasure person p gets from being in contact with person i 
• C(i,p) is 1 or 0 depending on whether person i is in contact with person p. 

If a single person “defects” from the norm, then they only get to keep in contact with one person, and unless that one person is super cool and chill, their utility is going to plummet. In a premodern society you would die. So no one is going to deviate.

The rule that you’re ostracized for not joining the ostracism is really important here. If you didn’t ostracize the non-ostracizers, they would break from the ostracism any time it was convenient, and the whole system would collapse (the Nash equilibrium would be one of no ostracizing). So it’s not surprising we see pollution elements of ostracism norms in societies across the globe. We see an emphasis on the pollution of moral wrongdoing in:

• Oedipus Rex
• Hinduism
• The Amish, Hutterites, and other “All in or all out” religious minorities.
• Old Testament Judaism.
• Roma

These tend to be societies that don’t get to use the government to enforce rules. This is the way you enforce strict rules without a government.

Another thing you’ll need for the norm to work is some kind of forgiveness. There have to be some lesser rules that people can violate occasionally without it being a big deal. We wouldn’t want full ostracism for, like, trespassing. And so it’s not surprising that annoying but affordable re-purification rituals appear in cultures all over the world.

Fun! Game Theory explaining phenomena!

But there are limitations. For this system to work:

• Everyone has to know everybody else’s business. If people don’t know exactly whom to ostracize, then they’ll end up fraternizing with people they should be ostracizing and the “pollution” rule will become unsustainable.
• Everyone has to know all of the rules, and everyone has to know that everyone else knows all the rules. 
• It has to be a huge pain to switch communities. If people could easily switch over, then getting ostracized would not be nearly as bad.

Those limitations are no problem in a village. But they get constraining in a big complicated city with a lot of immigrants and emigrants. So it’s not surprising that ostracism cultures tend to be in small communities, say two hundred people: congregations, rural villages, clans. They’re all good at ostracism and use it liberally.

But can it work in the city? Well, you’re going to need to break things down into teams.

The teams should work like this:

• Within your team, you ostracize anyone who breaks your team’s rules. But you don’t need to know anything about people on other teams. You can treat them all the same regardless of what they’ve done against their own rules.
• Fraternization across teams is severely restricted. Otherwise, when people were ostracized from their own team, they would meet their needs by spending time with members of other teams and getting ostracized wouldn’t be such a pain.
• The rules within your team are as simple as possible. This works best if the lifestyles of your team are as similar as possible. Like, you all have the same job. This way, you don’t need too many rules. Everyone’s life is about the same, so not that many unique situations arise in communal life, so the rules within a team can remain manageably simple.
• Each team collectively enforces its rights against the other teams. The rules for what a person on one team can do to a person on another team are relatively simple, and tit-for-tat strategies and cycles of reciprocal are common. In practice, teams with more military, political, or religious power will end up largely dominating the other teams.

Oh look. We’ve invented the caste system. And it has lasted two-thousand years.