Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This paper follows the law and norms literature in arguing that policymakers can use social norms to support or even replace regulation. Key to the approach offered here is the idea — borrowed from the folk theorem in game theory — that cooperative order can arise in circumstances where parties repeatedly interact. This paper proposes that repeated interaction between the same agents, specifically the intensity of it, may be used as a yardstick with which to gauge the potential to scale back regulation and use social norms as a substitute for law. Where there are very high levels of repeated …

This paper proposes a semiotic theory of norms—what I term normative semiotics. The paper’s central contention is that social norms are a language. Moreover, it is a language that we instinctively learn to speak. Normative behaviour is a mode of communication, the intelligibility of which allows us to establish cooperative relationships with others. Normative behaviour communicates an actor’s potential as a cooperative partner. Compliance with a norm is an act of communication: compliance signals cooperativeness; noncompliance signals uncooperativeness. An evolutionary model is proposed to explain how this comes about: evolution has generated an instinctual proficiency in working with these signals …