The Behavior of Information: A Reconsideration of Social Norms

Loughmiller-Cardinal, Jennifer A., and James Scott Cardinal. 2023. "The Behavior of Information: A Reconsideration of Social Norms" Societies 13, no. 5: 111. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13050111

Abstract

Do social norms really matter, or are they just behavioral idiosyncrasies that become associated with a group? Social norms are generally considered as a collection of formal or informal rules, but where do these rules come from and why do we follow them? The definition for social norm varies by field of study, and how norms are established and maintained remain substantially open questions across the behavioral sciences. In reviewing the literature on social norms across multiple disciplines, we found that the common thread appears to be information. Here, we show that norms are not merely rules or strategies, but part of a more rudimentary social process for capturing and retaining information within a social network. We have found that the emergence of norms can be better explained as an efficient system of communicating, filtering, and preserving experiential information. By reconsidering social norms and institutions in terms of information, we show that they are not merely conventions that facilitate the coordination of social behavior. They are, instead, the objective of that social coordination and, potentially, of the evolutionary adaptation of sociality itself.

Information, Entanglement, and Emergent Social Norms: Searching for 
’Normal’

Cardinal, James Scott, and Jennifer Ann Loughmiller-Cardinal. 2024. "Information, Entanglement, and Emergent Social Norms: Searching for `Normal’" Societies 14, no. 11: 227. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc14110227

Abstract



Social norms are often regarded as informal rules or strategies. Previously, we have proposed that norms are better understood as information. Social norms represent a behavioral adaptation that identifies and curates the information required to create and maintain a predictable environment. Here, we further demonstrate that social norms act as the leading edge of individual and collective search and optimization processes. These processes provide efficient and effective evolutionary mechanisms for constant adjustment and adaptation to an environment. We show that social norms constitute the forefront of our ability to ingest and process information, and are responsible for the conditions under which social and collective cognition are possible. This new model of social information processing provides not only insight into how humans adapt and evolve to diverse environments, but also provides concrete definitions of human sociality and its distinctions from that of other social animals. Our social constructs and behaviors are not separate from the physical world we inhabit, but are instead the primary means by which we exist within it.

Use, Purpose, and Function—Letting the Artifacts Speak



Loughmiller-Cardinal, Jennifer A., and J. Scott Cardinal. 2020. "Use, Purpose, and Function—Letting the Artifacts Speak" Heritage 3, no. 3: 587-605. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage3030034

Abstract

Archaeologists have likely collected, as a conservative estimate, billions of artifacts over the course of the history of fieldwork. We have classified chronologies and typologies of these, based on various formal and physical characteristics or ethno-historically known analogues, to give structure to our interpretations of the people that used them. The simple truth, nonetheless, is that we do not actually know how they were used or their intended purpose. We only make inferences—i.e., educated guesses based on the available evidence as we understand it—regarding their functions in the past and the historical behaviors they reflect. Since those inferences are so fundamental to the interpretations of archaeological materials, and the archaeological project as a whole, the way we understand materiality can significantly bias the stories we construct of the past. Recent work demonstrated seemingly contradictory evidence between attributed purpose or function versus confirmed use, however, which suggested that a basic premise of those inferences did not empirically hold to be true. In each case, the apparent contradiction was resolved by reassessing what use, purpose, and function truly mean and whether certain long-established functional categories of artifacts were in fact classifying by function. The resulting triangulation, presented here, narrows the scope on such implicit biases by addressing both empirical and conceptual aspects of artifacts. In anchoring each aspect of evaluation to an empirical body of data, we back ourselves away from our assumptions and interpretations so as to let the artifacts speak for themselves.