Values versus interests in the explanation of social conflict.

• Author: Chong, Dennis
• Position: Symposium: Law, Economics, & Norms

Custom reconciles us to everything.

--Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry(1)

INTRODUCTION: TWO APPROACHES TO EXPLAINING SOCIAL CONFLICT

Social norms are standards of social control. They establish ideal forms of behavior, assign value to different points of view and ways of life, and affect individual choice by increasing the attractiveness of certain alternatives over others. Norms are manifest in all walks of life, in our personal relationships, families, churches, schools, and places of employment, at social functions, on the street, and in the marketplace. Social norms depend for their enforcement on widespread recognition within one's social group that a general consensus exists around the norm. Some social norms are backed by the force of legal authority, but not all laws have the characteristics of social norms. Many laws are foreign to people insofar as they do not resonate like a social norm and do not strike people as obviously right or wrong.(2) Conflict over social norms is often upheld as a prime area where economic or rational choice models do not possess substantial explanatory power.(3) Economic models, according to this view, are best suited to studying conflicts over material interests rather than differences over ways of life. People pursue not only material benefits from the government in the form of economic policies and government programs, but also status or prestige benefits through government regulation of lifestyles. Social conflict over norms supposedly revolves around concerns about status and symbolic goals instead of pocketbook calculations. The idea of "status politics," for example, has been used to explain attempts by groups to pass laws that certify their cultural values and beliefs as the dominant norms of society. In a classic formulation, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote:

Besides their economic expectations, people have deep emotional

commitments in other spheres--religion, morals, culture, race

relations--which they also hope to see realized in political action.

Status politics seeks not to advance perceived material interests

but to express grievances and resentments about such matters, to

press claims upon society to give deference to non-economic

values. As a rule, status politics does more to express emotions

than to formulate policies.(4)

In general, theories of action that give priority to group ties and values have been dubbed sociological or social-psychological explanations, as opposed to economic or rational choice explanations.(5) In their ideal form, sociological explanations ground the motivation for behavior in people's attachment to social norms and primary group identifications rather than in their assessment of opportunity costs. Economic explanations, on the other hand, focus on the intentions of the agent, who chooses among alternative courses of action depending on the rewards that each alternative promises.(6) Rational behavior is motivated by the relative attractiveness of different alternatives rather than by the agent's deeply imprinted values, identities, and dispositions.

In the sociological view, changing behavior requires changing underlying values and dispositions, whereas in the economic view, behavior alters when rewards for different choices are changed. Values and dispositions, however, are said to be difficult to change, which is why they often prevail over considerations of self-interest.(7) Social values are the product of one's family, school, social class, church, and other groups and institutions that shape one's socialization experiences and cause one to internalize certain values and group identifications rather than others. A person's preferences and actions are therefore determined by the values that have been inculcated in him: those with higher education are more likely to support the mainstream norms of the system because they are better integrated in society and have been more heavily exposed to the institutions that promote these norms; children learn their partisanship from their parents and are likely to vote for the same political party when they become of age; and religious individuals give stronger support to conservative candidates than those who are less devout because these candidates appeal to their traditional attitudes and values.

Alternatively, political values can be explained in terms of intentional actions and strategic calculations. Interests shape values, which, in combination with assessments of the costs and benefits of available alternatives, determine choices. From this rational choice perspective, people are motivated by instrumental reasons to adopt the opinions that they hold, whereas in the sociological view how--and indeed whether--an individual thinks about politics depends largely on the way he has been socialized rather than on strategic considerations.

Despite the infiltration of economic reasoning into many areas of social science, research on attitude and opinion differences (on both economic and noneconomic issues) has successfully resisted the impulse to trace the formation of attitudes and the origins of group conflict primarily to self-interested motivations. In fact, the received view among political scientists continues to be that with few exceptions self-interested motivations do not significantly affect a person's stance on political issues.(8) Research on political attitudes instead emphasizes political socialization, cultural values, personal traits and dispositions, and social learning processes as explanatory factors, which reflects the sociological and social psychological heritage of the research.(9) True to such origins, the individual at the center of these studies is not a rational maximizer who takes any position and follows any course that increases his personal welfare, but rather a much less flexible creature of political socialization and conformity, whose views reflect deep-seated personality characteristics, the enduring impact of cultural values and norms learned early in life, and the pervasive influence of reference groups and elite opinion leaders.

As I elaborate in Part I, the best evidence for the sociological model is that values and group identifications often seem to develop without respect to self-interest and to motivate actions that ignore opportunity costs. One aim of this Article is to discuss how rational choice can account for some of this behavior, although ultimately I believe that the sociological view has merit. The Article's main purpose, however, is to show that, by giving short shrift to the role of interests, the sociological approach fails to provide a coherent explanation of how social norms and values are formed and why they represent a continual source of conflict. I will not simply recast the story of how norms develop along lines that are consistent with a rational choice explanation; rather I will argue that an explanation of social conflict that does not treat norms and values strategically leaves unresolved the origin of group norms and group differences, the motivation behind conformity to group norms, and the reasons why people defend their norms and seek to impose their norms on others. In Parts II through VII, I enumerate several ways that interests and rational decision making support the values and norms we learn and defend as members of groups. First, general values such as those encompassed within a political ideology may serve as long-term commitments to a way of life that allow one to make sense of the world and to economize on decisions.(10) Second, decision making is sometimes guided by values that constitute beliefs about which alternative best serves one's interest.(11) Third, social norms sometimes follow from calculated considerations of self or group interest.(12) Fourth, an explanation of social conformity processes around group norms rests on the mechanism of self and group interest.(13) Fifth, even when the substance of the group norm does not directly serve one's interest, it can be in one's interest to conform when the norm represents a social convention that everyone has an interest in supporting so long as others do so.(14) And lastly, irrespective of whether values are formed out of self-interested calculations, there are likely to be self-interested reasons to defend those values against intrusion once people have invested in them through their earlier decisions.(15)

While emphasizing the role that rationality and strategy play in disputes over social norms, I doubt that these conflicts can be understood completely in such terms. In Parts VIII and IX, I argue that there appears to be an irreducibly nonrational element in social conflicts stemming from the manner in which people draw inferences and generalizations about those who are different from themselves and develop cultural theories based on such faulty assumptions. These cultural theories defend group traditions and practices as being essential to political and economic progress, and popular subscription to such theories accounts for much of the animus behind defense of the status quo. But despite the prevalence of these folk theories, people still act in conventionally strategic ways--protecting their political position, coordinating action on the basis of existing coalitions, using government to legislate against supposedly pernicious ideas and threatening groups--when they put these theories into practice.(16)

1. THE NATURE OF SOCIAL VALUES

   1. Cultural Habit and Inertia

      One would think that former Oregon Senator Bob Packwood, while dogged by charges that he had a history of making unwanted sexual advances to women and while under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee, would have stopped telling sexual jokes in public and would have resisted the temptation to compliment pretty women. Indeed, a person accused of sexual misconduct might be expected to smarten up and become especially vigilant about his own behavior, especially...