Normative Conflict and Normative Change

Human life is riddled with norms, many though not all of which are costly for individuals to adopt. Similarly, human ecological adaptation relies on costly-behaviors that often generate non-rivalrous and non-exclusionary benefits for group-members. Yet, in a dynamic world, innovations, environmental change, and information-revelation mean that what norms are beneficial for a group to adopt will inevitably change over time. However, multiple game-theoretic models studying the various mechanisms stabilizing normative behaviors have demonstrated that the stability of a norm does not depend on the benefits it confers. In turn, explanations of normative change have either relied on group-selective mechanisms to explain the presence of adaptive norms or have failed to identify conditions under which normative change occurs. We study normative change by means of costly-punishment and conflict resolution. We identify social differentiation in goals and punishment capacity as a key condition permitting normative change. While normative change that results from such social differentiation need not be group beneficial it will be beneficial to some subset of agents in the population. We additionally discuss how the intra-societal forces of normative conflict that we study might interact with group-selective forces and in turn determine the dynamics and outcomes of group-selection.