The Evolution of Norms
- 1 May 2001
- journal article
- research article
- Published by University of Chicago Press in American Journal of Sociology
- Vol. 106 (6), 1493-1545
- https://doi.org/10.1086/321298
Abstract
Social norms that induce us to reward or punish people not for what they did to us but for what they did to other members of one’s group have long been thought as sine qua non sociological and thus impossible to explain in terms of rational choice. This article shows how social norms can be deductively derived from principles of (boundedly) rational choice as mechanisms that are necessary to stabilize behaviors in a large class of evolutionary games.Keywords
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