Seminari del Progetto "Circular Social Norms - Ci_SoNo"
in collaborazione con
Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa dell'Università di Firenze
martedì 28 gennaio 2020, ore 14:00
DISEI - Dipartimento di Economia e Scienze dell'Impresa
via delle Pandette 32 - Firenze
Edificio D6 - Aula Bracco (I piano)
Cédric Paternotte
(Università di Parigi-Sorbonne)
The rise and fall of unpopular norms
Abstract:
Unpopular norms, often discussed under the label of 'pluralistic ignorance', are intuitively puzzling: they are established in a community although no one wants to follow them. Classical examples include foot binding, binge drinking, norms of vendetta, etc. How do we explain their appearance and stability? While a number of works on this topic exist, all fail to simultaneously explain two key features of pluralistic ignorance : it arises gradually but often disappears suddenly. I argue that the main difficulty in modelling unpopular norms precisely consists in reconciling those seemingly opposite demands - because slow appearance presupposes a kind of stability that fast disappearance seems to exclude. I investigate the rise and fall of unpopular norms through a multi-agent simulation, in which agents gradually learn about their environment and have not one but two kinds of partly linked but distinct expectations : empirical expectations (about how one thinks others behave) and normative expectations (about how one thinks others want one to behave). In such a model, the gradual appearance of an unpopular norm becomes compatible with its sudden disappearance.