An Economist's Perspective on the Evolution of Norms
The idea that social norms can be explained in terms of the interests of the individuals adhering to them, rather than taken as given constraints on action imposed by a mysterious Society that predates its participants, and that they are the survivors of an evolutionary process of selection, is not a recent one. In his forthcoming book Playing Fair, Ken Binmore traces it at least as far back as David Hume. In this century, authors such as Hayek [1979] and Popper [1965] have proposed as a general evolutionary program for the social sciences to explain social institutions, as far as is possible, as the unintended results of individual action. In this framework, macro regularities are seen as byproducts, or epiphenomena, of processes in which the motivation of the actors involved is typically not to institute such a regularity, but can be something else entirely. This focus of attention not on individual behavior but on the systemic properties of the marco level is arguably the proper one for economic theory. If economics were really about explaining individual decision making, it would be indistinguishable in its goal from psychology and not a separate discipline. It could even be argued that economics should really be concerned with such systematic results as come about regardless of how individuals act. (See also the discussion in