Punish All Norm Violators!

Friday, May 30, 2025

Punish All Norm Violators!

In a very cleverly designed sociological study, young children were shown an individual and a puppet who were demonstrating how to use a physical contraption. The adults would look either confident or unsure as they modeled how to use the device—something imaginative that the children had never seen before. And then the puppet, which had been “asleep”, would play with the same device, using it either correctly or incorrectly. Children would be upset with the puppet when they saw it use the device incorrectly, based on the adult model’s demonstration—whether the adult looked competent or not. The children ascribe greater authority to the adult model, and they get impatient when the puppet doesn’t follow the model—even sight unseen.

In a separate test, children ranging from three to five were told different stories involving mice. One scenario involved the mice behaving according to norms, and in another, the norms weren’t stated or implied. The children who heard about the mice violating norms believed the norm violators deserved to be punished, in this case, by a cat that the norm-violating mice had tipped off to their friends’ whereabouts.

The youngest of our species appear to believe it is a punishable offense to violate social norms. Given the choice, very young children appear to consider it more important to impose negative sanctions on those who violate a social norm than it is to reward observed behavior that conforms with what competent model adults or fictitious mice demonstrate.

I may not be a young child, but I agree. One of my problems with our current president, for instance, is that he has openly defied so many social norms. And that leaves me with the sense that he should be punished for doing so. To name one such violation: all the lying, which he has at times embraced as an achievement in its own right.

What type of punishment? In small societies, such as hunter-gatherer bands, norm violators can be punished in a variety of ways. For minor violations, violators may become fair game for targeted theft of their belongings when they’re not looking. They may find their garden plots or sleeping quarters damaged in some way. They face targeted gossipy whisper campaigns to damage their reputations even further. They might be left out of food distribution, or even be beaten or murdered by members of their band as retribution. It depends on how serious the tribe views the violations, and what the tribe’s culture deems to be the correct punishment.

In the case of our politics, those who support the president and his team believe—contrariwise—that most of the preceding politicians were the ones who violated the norms a long time ago. They would argue that the current president is, in fact, permitted to violate norms as a punishment to the system for all those previous decades of norm violations.

Joseph Henrich doesn’t address contemporary politics in The Secrets of Our Success when discussing how our species is designed to learn and propagate culture. But extrapolating from his discussion, it seems reasonable to assume our genetic predisposition doesn’t in itself tell us right from wrong. Our social instincts make it natural for us to identify socially normal behavior just by observation, from our earliest years of life. In those years, we begin with learning the language of our tribe and family. From there we start learning the skills we need from elders, and we learn to distinguish between people who are competent or incompetent. We are designed to learn what “our” people consider appropriate and inappropriate behaviors.

The inclination to impose sanctions on norm violators has indeed been important enough to our survival that we’ve got that tendency from such an early age.