Information Constituencies and Social Coordination
Honors project, Kara Boonsirisermsook
Supervised by Francis Steen
13 November 2001

Introduction

In Rational Ritual, Michael Chwe points out that rational agents have good reason to coordinate their activities with other members of society. He argues that this fact can be used to explain numerous aspects of such coordinating behavior, such as which computer to buy and which type of beer to drink. In contrast, in this study, we would like to explore an alternative explanation, along the lines proposed by Dan Sperber in Explaining Culture. We hypothesize that social coordination is a result of evolved cognitive structures, whose operations are ordered by emotional imperatives and selection biases. These emotions and selection biases (or preferences) are often unconscious and typically not adequately warranted by rational choice considerations. We expect their precise design to reflect the adaptive problem they are hypothesized by us to resolve, namely social coordination in a small Pleistocene community.

Theoretical framework

• A. Culture as the solution to an adaptive problem
  • "Man is a political animal" -- Aristotle
  • human survival depends on coordinated action -- i.e., it forms an adaptive problem
  • natural selection has constructed specialized cognitive systems for solving adaptive problems
  • action springs from beliefs and desires (commonsense psychology model)
  • in evolutionary history, natural selection may have built cognitive systems that ensured coordinated beliefs and desires
  • do we have adaptations for achieving coordinated thought?
  • In brief, the hypothesis is that human beings have adaptations for acquiring culture?
• Refining the question
  • In order to solve the problem of coordination, people need common knowledge
  • Common knowledge is knowledge that I know you have, you know I have, etc.
  • The rational choice model: see Michael Chwe, Common Knowledge
  • The adaptationist alternative: a distinct motivational component
    • the desire to coordinate with others as an end in itself, vs.
    • the desire to coordinate with others an a means to an extrinsic end
  • In brief, the hypothesis is that coordinating with others has an emotional component and is experienced as intrinsically rewarding and important, even if there are no external benefits
• Component questions
  • Domains of coordination:
    • what types of activities are subject to coordination, and what types are not?
    • what characterizes activities in these two categories?
    • surface coordination: clothing and body decoration, eating habits, entertainment
    • deep coordination: morals, values, ethics, religion
  • Strategies of coordination
    • frequency sampling vs acquiring information preferentially from information authorities
    • horizontal (between peers) vs vertical (hierarchical)
    • one-to-many vs. many-to-many
  • Motivation
    • subjective phenomenology of coordination is intrinsically rewarding, vs.
    • coordination is an entrance ticket to other, extrinsic goods, vs.
    • coordination is automatic and does not require a motivational system
    • emotions as guarantors of threats and promises (Franks)
  • External goods
    • your morality is beneficial to others and in some cases costly to yourself
    • coordination makes people more predictable to each other
      • trust simplifies relationship immensely
    • rule-bound behavior ("social contracts") requires common values to work
  • Costs of coordination
  • sheep-like mentality stifles new ideas
  • fear of deviance, of being different
  • morality imposes opportunity costs
• Definitions
  • Information constituencies and authorities
    • an information constituency is a group of people that derive their information preferentially from the same source(s)
    • an information authority is the source of information for a constituency
  • Horizontal and vertical information flows
    • vertical information flows are hierarchical and unidirectional
    • horizontal information flows cut across competing vertical flows

The problem of any counterculture is that it tends to create its own authorities, precisely because people are attempting to use the new information to form new coordinated information constituencies.

There is a whole set of issues that relate to morality, rational agents, game theory, and the cost of enforcing social norms. Our focus here is more narrowly on where people acquire information and why, and conversely where people target information and why. The goal is to develop a model of social information flow grounded in psychology, and to test whether people are selectively attending to information sources in order to create or sustain information constituencies. To put it differently, we want to test whether people value information from a certain source because they view themselves as belonging to an information constituency defined by that source -- not because they have a reason to think the information is especially reliable or relevant to their ability to act in the situation.

Entertainment is a special case, since here the information is more purely useless on the surface, and more purely directed towards general ethical judgments that are vital for coordinated action. To test this hypothesis, we would have to try to find out if people derive moral lessons from entertainment, and whether they expect these moral lessons to be shared by others in such a way as to form common knowledge.

Interview protocol:

• What subcultures do you belong to?
  • At home, with the family
  • On campus: Goths, sports, ethnic
  • free time, hobbies
  • other?
• Who are your role models?
  • Within the subcultures you belong to
  • In mass media (actors, movies, television, music, etc.)
• How did these people become your role models?
• How do you decide what is valuable?
  • what to cherish and protect (compassion, nature protection, social solidarity)
  • what is cool and fashionable (body decoration, dress, language, behavior, etc)
  • what to aspire to become (profession, better person, social status)
• What are your major / main sources of information about what is valuable?
  • parents, older relatives
  • mass media (movies, television, music, newspapers, magazines, etc.)
  • religion (church, temple, synagogue, mosque, ...)
  • peers (one person more than others?)
• How would you feel if your values were different from everybody else's?
  • different from parents and relatives?
  • different from mass media?
  • different from your religious community?
  • different from your friends?
  • different from mainstream culture (UCLA, LA, CA, USA)?

You brought up the point about belonging to mutually conflicting information constituencies, which is definitely worth pursuing.

References

Michael Chwe, Michael. Rational Ritual.

Sperber, Dan (1996). Explaining Culture. Author's abstract.

Sociology of Knowledge -- possibly useful:

Parsons, Talcott (1952). "Some fundamental categories of the theory of action; a general statement." In Toward a General Theory of Action. Talcott Parsons & Edward A. Shils, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp.3-29.

Swidler, Ann (1979). Organizations Without Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.