Potato, Potahto: Why some norm changes are more annoying than others

A guest post by Evan Westra and Daniel Kelly

We’re grateful to Paul Bloom for his complimentary words and thoughtful reply to our essay, and for generously offering us the chance to respond here on Small Potatoes.

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Let’s start with a quick recap: in our essay, we give a handful of (hopefully relatable) examples of people becoming annoyed when they are wrong-footed by a new norm, and argue that such seemingly innocent episodes of irritation can turn into obstacles to moral progress. We identify a source of this annoyance as “affective friction”, a feeling of discomfort that arises when there is a mismatch between the norms a person has internalized and the norms that hold in their current social environment. Bloom argues this account leaves out something important: in some cases what makes the incongruity especially annoying for the person is not simply the novelty of the new norm, but the fact that it has – or the person sees it as having – certain moral features. Here’s how Bloom puts it:

The norm changes that bother us are those where (1) people are morally condemned for not following them (or for not having followed them in the past); (2) people condemn themselves as bad people for not following them (or for not having followed them in the past); or (3) people think that they are morally wrong.

Overall, we agree with Bloom that some cases of norm change are going to be more annoying and more emotionally charged than others. However, we’re a little wary of characterizing this difference in terms of the presence or absence of moral features. This isn’t to say that we’re skeptics about right and wrong – far from it. As Bloom notes, we are moral realists, at least in the general sense that we think there are facts about right and wrong. This is why we are so concerned with moral progress in our essay.¹ Our issue is that we don’t think human psychology draws a sharp distinction between the moral features and nonmoral features of the world.

This is actually a very thorny issue for empirical moral psychologists. Some think that from a young age, we intuitively distinguish between moral and nonmoral features of the world, of different kinds of rules and actions. Those who hold this view often support it by appeal to evidence from experiments on the so-called moral/conventional distinction. However, others are skeptical about whether there is a sharp psychological boundary around the moral domain, disagree about where such a boundary should be drawn, and doubt whether it should be drawn at all. In different places, both of us have gone on record expressing sympathy with this more skeptical set of views. We’re generally doubtful that moral vs. nonmoral distinctions can or should do much work in psychological explanations of human behavior – including in the cases we discuss in our essay.

That said, we think Bloom is onto something. So, we’re going to try to recast some of what he says about the especially emotionally fraught “moral features” of certain norms in different terms - terms that we think will show how our view aims to account for the kinds of cases that Bloom has in mind.

First, we agree with Bloom that affective friction cannot entirely account for the kind of kneejerk dismissiveness and eye-rolling that (we argue) poses an obstacle to moral progress. We think of affective friction as something that can snowball from mild, passing discomfort into much more intense emotional responses, depending on the context. That’s why we included this bit in our original essay:

Then there are all the ways that the social enforcement of norms can aggravate affective friction. Norm psychologies incline people to react disapprovingly towards whomever breaks one of these unwritten social rules. We’ve all had the experience of unwittingly committing a faux pas only to be abruptly corrected – or worse, judged – by our peers. This can feel pretty lousy. Now, on top of the awkwardness of trying to adjust to a new, unfamiliar norm, you’re also embarrassed and shamed for your mistakes. While expert familiarity with local norms is a sign that you’re a member of the community, being singled out for violating a norm makes you feel like you don’t belong.

Here, we’re talking about a notion that elsewhere we’ve called social maintenance, which we take to be one of the defining features of norms. “Social maintenance” refers to the fact that norms are not simply behaviors that are statistically common within a community. Rather, they are behavioral regularities that are present in the community because they are in some way enforced or incentivized by the actions of its members. That means that something like opening doors with one’s right hand wouldn’t be a norm in our book, even though it’s statistically common (we assume, since roughly 90% of people are right-handed): nobody sanctions left-handed door openers.² It seems to us that something similar may be true of the two cases that Bloom uses to show how some norms aren’t so annoying: putting the lab manager’s contact information on the slides, and having slide text that’s easy to read.

Now, there are lots of ways a norm might be socially maintained. Some forms of social maintenance are positive (praising people for compliance) and while others are negative (imposing a social cost for violation). There are also more or less intense degrees and forms social maintenance. For example, imagine Larry, a guest at a dinner party who highjacks the conversation by abruptly asking everyone about their preferred genres of pornography.

The others at the party might enforce the norms of polite conversation Larry is violating by flashing expressions of discomfort or disgust, by trying to gracefully steer the discussion back to something more appropriate, or by forcefully interrupting him before he gets too graphic. They might also go on to tell everyone they know about what a creep Larry was being, resorting to outright criticism and gossip that could damage Larry’s reputation and lead to a serious loss in social status. Larry will probably feel more or less emotionally stung depending on the intensity of the sanctions he receives. In general, and all else equal, more severe forms of negative social maintenance will, by design, be experienced as more unpleasant by the norm violator. This might make the norm stronger, but it could also lead the sanctioned person to stew in bitterness, and perhaps down a pathway of resistance to the norm.

Ok, with these points on the table, here’s one way of reconstructing what Bloom is onto in his post that doesn’t appeal to a claim about how people respond to moral vs. nonmoral features of norms. Some novel behavioral regularities are less prone to generate negative reactions from those who aren’t conforming to them because those emerging behavioral regularities not socially maintained at all – i.e. they’re not what we’d call norms. In cases that actually involve socially maintained norms, there’s also a wide range of different forms of social maintenance that can be used to stabilize them, and these can be experienced more or less negatively (or positively) by the santionee. So, some new norms will be especially exasperating when - on top of their unfamiliarity - there are high, or just perhaps growing, social costs for violating them.

Another bit of our essay, one that comes right after the last passage we quoted, was an attempt to portray how familiar social dynamics further exacerbate the emotional effects of affective friction and social maintenance:

This sort of experience can lead to resentment. It can sow the seeds of backlash, especially in situations where a new norm is not spreading uniformly within the community. In cases where norm diffusion is patchy, the differences between early adopters of a new norm, and those holding on to the old norm, often fall along familiar social divisions. In situations where socioeconomic status, race, age, gender and political affiliation loom large, the activation of psychological responses sensitive to social identity and group membership can add more layers to the experience of affective friction.

Who follows which norms often falls along group boundaries - so much so that you can tell who belongs to which group by the norms they adhere to (e.g., land acknowledgments and calls for a Gaza ceasefire), and which ones they brazenly break. This in itself can be a problem if two groups are already at odds. Simply observing another person adhering to a weird norm might be enough to get you annoyed, especially when you hold a bunch of negative stereotypes about them (Ugh, philosophers can be so pedantic). Perhaps even more charged are contexts where different groups interact, and members of one group are trying to enforce their norms on the members of the other. For those in the latter group, the spreading of the norm is likely to feel like an imposition from the outside, an attempt of the other group to dominate them. In addition to affective friction and negative social maintenance, it is also likely to trigger an intergroup threat response. Hackles will be raised; resistance will be primed.

In our view, all these factors can influence how we experience the core seed of affective friction, how we make sense of it, and what we do with it. The sheer novelty of a new norm produces some basic discomfort, which our brains try to interpret. In some contexts - say, when you’re traveling or you’ve emigrated to a new place - your brain might interpret that discomfort as a learning cue, a piece of useful information about a norm you need to adopt to fit in and smoothly move through your new environment. But in other contexts – where you feel like you’re on your home turf and the new norm seems like it’s coming from people you don’t really like anyway (and who are probably just trying to boss you around and impress all their friends, those self-righteous virtue signalers!), it will hit different. Your experience of that discomfort is more likely to present as something more like irritation. It’ll be pretty tempting to respond to it with a dismissive eyeroll or even outright resistance, and so you’ll be less likely to give the new norm a fair hearing, whatever its actual merits.

Of course, not all social change will be for the better, and not all new norms, however they arrive on the scene, will usher in improvements if adopted. Of course. But our view is that this story about affective friction, especially when it becomes entangled in social dynamics driven by harsh negative social maintenance and polarization, can make people prone to resist new norms even when the new norm is neutral or a step in the direction of progress.

How does all this stack up to Bloom’s suggestion that it’s the moral features of these cases that are particularly annoying? Well, that’s not how we’d describe it, but we don’t think it’s really that far off what we’re trying to say. Potato, potahto.

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1. Importantly, we don’t think anyone needs to agree with us about which specific changes constitute moral progress or regress in order to go along with our overall argument. If you think that some norm changes will make the world a genuinely better place, you should also buy our conclusion that moral progress will often be annoying. If readers don’t like the examples we take to be instances of progressive norm change, we invite them to substitute in an example they find more amenable. The argument about affective friction still goes through.

2. Yeah, yeah, we know: they used to punish people for being left-handed. Now they don’t. Hey, look, a case of moral progress!