Social Norms

Justin Alexander has an interesting post on the case of Twixt; a media professor named David Myers decided to play in an online game. He decided to deliberately ignore the social conventions of the game (it being an online role-playing game) and focus entirely on what the rules would allow (even if doing so irritated, annoyed and frustrated his fellow players).

For me the key quote was:

Given the adaptive value of individual play in exploring and revealing system characteristics, the social pressures against this sort of play in CoH/V seem drastically and overly harsh, even unnatural.

This approach ignores that, in most societies there are two layers to behavioral constraint. One is the use of actual laws while the other is social norms of behavior that apply to interactions. These social norms act as an important break on places where the rules do not apply. Would we not have concerns with an person who used an innovative approach to the law in order to committ pre-meditated murder? Would we decide that this was an important legal innovation and encourage more such innovation? Or would we be seriously concerned about the actions of the person involved.

I think that this issue is central to understanding how to make innovation work well; ideally innovation needs to be both an improvement and be accepted by the potential users. While the Twixt case was rather extreme, it does have some important issues for Epidemiology. When we diagnose risk factors for disease, we also have to decide what the current social context accepts as a reasonable implementation of these findings. Some ideas, like standing desks, might take a while to gain social acceptance. Others, like smoking, may require decades long public health campaigns to finally reduce the levels of exposure, despite the potential health risks involved.

Innovation is a complicated business . . .