Fig. – Christ having some problems on passing the right message. Comic strip from Zach Weiner (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal blog – smbc-comics.com ).

Social psychologists, sociologists, and economists have all proposed theories of norm emergence. In general, they views norm emergence as depending on three factors: (i) actors’ preferences regarding their own behaviour (inclinations); (ii) actors’ preferences regarding the behaviour of others (regulatory interests); and (iii) measures for enforcing norms (enforcement resources), such as access to sanctions and information. Whereas most studies of norm emergence have focused on inclinations or enforcement resources, this article analyses the role of regulatory interests in norm emergence. Specifically, it analyses systems of collective sanctions in which, when and individual violates or complies with a rule, not merely the individual but other members of that person’s group as well are collectively punished of rewarded by an external agent. These collective sanctions give individuals an incentive to regulate one another’s behaviour. This paper demonstrates that when a group is subjected to collective sanctions, a variety of responses may be rational: the group may either create a secondary sanctioning system to enforce the agent’s dictates, or it may revolt against the agent to destroy its sanctioning capacity. According to the proposed theoretic model. the optimal response depends quite sensitively on the group’s size, internal cohesion, and related factors. Abstract: D.D. Heckathorn, “Collective sanctions and the creation of prisoner’s dilemma norms“, American Journal of Sociology (1988), Volume: 94, Issue: 3, Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Pages: 535-562.

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Video – […] see, in this world, there are two kinds of people, … my friend, … those with ‘loaded guns’ and those who dig. You dig. […] Last 8 minutes finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo), a 1966 Italian epic spaghetti western film directed by Sergio Leone, starring Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood in the title roles, playing a kind of 3-agent Prisoner’s dilemma game. Now, one of them, the Good (Clint Eastwood) is the only who knows he is in fact just playing a 2-agent PD game. And that,  besides the inner non-linearity complexity of the ‘game’, makes all the difference…