In the late 1980s, when I was a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, I happened to pass, in the hallway near my office, a law student (female) speaking to an older law professor (male). To my amazement, the professor was stroking the student’s hair. I thought I saw, very briefly, a grimace on her face. It was a quick flash. When he left, I said to her, “That was completely inappropriate. He shouldn’t have done that.” Her response was dismissive: “It’s fine. He’s an old man. It’s really not a problem.”
Thirty minutes later, I heard a knock on my door. It was the student. She was in tears. She said, “He does this all the time. It’s horrible. My boyfriend thinks I should make a formal complaint, but I don’t want to do that. Please—I don’t want to make a fuss. Do not talk to him about it and do not tell anyone.” (What I did in response is a tale for another occasion.)
Social norms imposed constraints on what the law student could say or do. She hated what the professor was doing; she felt harassed. After hearing my little comment, she felt free to tell me what she actually thought. But because of existing norms, she did not want to say or do anything.
I am interested here in two different propositions. The first is that that when norms start to collapse, people are unleashed, in the sense that they feel free to reveal what they believe and prefer, to disclose their experiences, and to talk and act as they wish. (Bystanders can of course be important here.) New norms, and laws that entrench or fortify them, may lead to the discovery of preexisting beliefs, preferences, and values. The discovery can be startling. In various times and places, the women’s movement has been an example. The same is true for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the movement for LGBT rights, and the disability rights movement. It is also true for the pro-life movement.
The second is that revisions of norms can construct preferences and values. New norms, and laws that entrench or fortify them, can give rise to beliefs, preferences, and values that did not exist before. No one is unleashed. People are changed. Something like this can be said for the antismoking movement, the rise of seatbelt-buckling, and the rise of Nazism.
Begin with the phenomenon of unleashing: When certain norms are in force, people falsify their preferences or are silent about them. As a result, strangers and even friends and family members may not be able to know about them.1 People with certain political or religious convictions might just shut up. Once norms are revised, people will reveal preexisting preferences and values, which norms had successfully suppressed. What was once unsayable is said, and what was once unthinkable is done.
In the context of sexual harassment, something like this account is broadly correct: Women disliked being harassed, or even hated it, and revision of old norms was (and remains) necessary to spur expression of their feelings and beliefs.2 (This account is incomplete, and I will complicate it.) As we shall see, law often plays a significant role in fortifying existing norms or in spurring their revision.3 Part of the importance of judicial rulings that forbid sexual harassment is that they contributed to the revision of norms.4 The election of a new leader or the enactment of new legislation5 can have a crucial and even transformative signaling effect, offering people information about what other people think. If people hear the signal, norms may shift, because people are influenced by what they think other people think.6
But some revisions of norms, and some laws that entrench those revisions, do not liberate anything. As norms begin to be altered, people come to hold, or to act as if they hold, preferences and values that they did not hold before. Revisions of norms, and resulting legal reforms, do not uncover suppressed desires; they produce new ones, or at least statements and actions that are consistent with new ones.
Consider in this regard the idea of “political correctness,” which is standardly a reference to left-leaning social norms, forbidding the expression of views that defy the left-of-center orthodoxy and so silencing people. Political correctness means that people cannot say what they actually think; they are forced into some kind of closet. (The very term should be seen as an effort to combat existing norms. Part of the cleverness of the term is that it describes those who follow certain views as cowardly conformists, rather than people who are committed to hard-won principles.7) That is often what happens. On many university campuses, those who are right of center learn to shut up. What a terrible lesson: they are leashed. But in other environments, the norms are different, and they can say what they think. Sometimes their friends and associates are surprised, even stunned: “Does he really think that? I had no idea.”
In the educational setting, one problem is that left-of-center students will have no idea about the actual distribution of views within the community. They might think that everyone thinks as they do. Another problem is that people will be less able to learn from one another. And when people say what they actually think, large-scale changes might occur. I taught at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1980s, when a group of terrific students created the Federalist Society, an organization dedicated to the exploration and defense of conservative views about the American legal system. The Federalist Society has had a massive effect on American political and legal life because it creates a kind of forum, or enclave, in which people can say what they think.
But whether left or right, political correctness can go beyond the suppression of views. It can also reconstruct preferences and values, making certain views unthinkable (for better or for worse). If some view is beyond the pale, people will stop expressing it. Eventually the unthinkable might become unthought. Is that chilling? Sometimes, but sometimes not; it is not terrible if no one thinks pro-Nazi thoughts.
A stunning study of the power of political correctness comes from Saudi Arabia.8 In that country, there remains a custom of “guardianship,” by which husbands are allowed to have the final word on whether their wives work outside the home. The overwhelming majority of young married men are privately in favor of female labor force participation. But those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they think that other, similar men do not want women to join the labor force. When researchers randomly corrected those young men’s beliefs about what other young men believed, they became far more willing to let their wives work. The result was a significant impact on what women actually did. A full four months after the intervention, the wives of men in the experiment were more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job.
The best reading of this research is that because of social norms, men in Saudi Arabia are in a sense leashed, and as a result, their wives are leashed as well. Most young men privately support female labor force participation, but they will say what they think, even to their own wives, only after they learn that other young men think as they do. It is fair to say that after the researchers revealed what young men actually thought, both men and women ended up more liberated.
Does it matter whether revisions of norms free people to say what they think or instead construct new preferences and values? For purposes of understanding social phenomena, it certainly does. If preferences and values are hidden, rapid social change is possible and nearly impossible to predict.9 When people are silent about their preferences or values, and when they falsify them, it can be exceedingly difficult to know what they are. Because people conceal their preferences, outsiders cannot readily identify them. If people are discontent but fail to say so, and if they start to talk and act differently once norms are challenged and changed, then large-scale shifts in behavior are possible—but no one may have anticipated them.10
The rise of norms against sex discrimination and sexual harassment is an example (which is hardly to say that either has disappeared). The partial collapse of norms authorizing or promoting discrimination against transgender people can be seen in similar terms: For (many) transgender people, the effect is to prevent self-silencing and preference falsification. Similar dynamics help account for the rise of religions,11 the fall of Communism,12 the Arab Spring,13 and the election of Donald Trump.14
When revisions in norms produce new preferences and beliefs, rapid change is also possible, but the mechanics are different. Those who produce such change do not seek to elicit preexisting preferences, beliefs, and values. As norms shift, people are not liberated. Influenced and informed by new or emerging norms, they develop fresh thoughts and feelings, or at least act as if they have them.15 The rise of Nazism is famously complicated and highly disputed, but it can be understood in these terms.16 From one view, of course, it had a great deal to do with the longstanding geographical segregation of Jews and the emergence of suppressed hatred: “In this separation the devil slumbered and in slumber built sinew before Hitler was born.”17 From another view, Hitler was able to spur hatred that did not really exist before. As one former Nazi put it, he was not anti-Semitic “until [he] heard anti-Semitic propaganda.”18
We can also find intermediate cases, in which people do not exactly have antecedent preferences that norms silence, but in which they hear a stubborn, uneasy voice in their heads that they ignore, thinking, Why bother to listen to that? But as norms start to shift, that question has an answer: Maybe it is telling me something important, or something that reflects my real feelings and beliefs. There is a kind of intrapersonal tipping point at which that answer becomes louder and people’s statements and actions change.
My principal examples involve discrimination, but the general points hold more broadly. Consider, for example, cigarette smoking, seatbelt buckling, alcohol consumption, uses of green energy, purchases of organic food, considerateness,19 veganism, the use of new languages,20 polyamory, religious beliefs and practices,21 drug use, and crime. In all of these cases, norms can constrain antecedent preferences; new norms can liberate them or instead help construct new ones (or at least the appearance of new ones). In all of these cases, revisions in norms can result in large-scale changes in an astoundingly short time, including legal reforms, which can entrench and fortify those revisions.
Let’s begin with an intuitive account, offered by Jon Elster, who emphasizes that social norms are “shared by other people and partly sustained by their approval and disapproval. They are also sustained by the feelings of embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, and shame that a person suffers at the prospect of violating them.”22 Elster’s quartet is worth underlining: embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, and shame are different from one another. The student at Columbia Law School felt all four. In cases of sexual harassment, that is not uncommon.
Because violations of social norms create such negative feelings, they impose costs on those who violate them. In that sense, they operate in the same way as taxes,23 and the costs might turn out to be low or high. Importantly, however, some people are rebels, by nature or circumstance, and for them defiance of social norms, taken as such, might be a benefit rather than a cost. I will have something to say shortly about the importance of rebels.
In the simplest and most common cases, the objects of discrimination have an antecedent preference, and the norm prevents them from stating or acting on it. The preference may even be falsified (as it was when the law student initially assured me that she did not object to what the professor was doing). In that respect, the objects of discrimination are like actors in a play; they are reciting the expected lines. In cases of sex and race discrimination, that is a familiar phenomenon. The legitimation of the antecedent preference brings it out of the closet; recall here the young men in Saudi Arabia, who had no objection to female labor force participation.
In circumstances of this kind, large-scale change is possible. Suppose that many people within a population object to discrimnation, but because of existing norms they do not say or do anything. Suppose that the objectors have different thresholds for raising an objection. A few people will do so if even one person challenges or defies the norm; a few more will do so if a few people challenge or defy the norm; still more will do so if more than a few people challenge or defy the norm; and so on. Under the right conditions, and with the right distribution of thresholds, a small spark can ignite a conflagration, eventually dismantling the norm.24
There is an important role here for norm entrepreneurs,25 operating in the private or public sector, who oppose existing norms and try to change them. Norm entrepreneurs draw attention to what they see as the stupidity, unnaturalness, intrusiveness, or ugliness of current norms. They may insist that many or most people secretly oppose them (and thus reduce pluralistic ignorance, understood as ignorance about what most people actually think).26 They may describe their experiences. Norm breakers—those who simply depart from existing norms, and refuse to speak or act in accordance with them—may or may not be norm entrepreneurs, depending on whether they seek to produce some kind of social change, or instead wish merely to do as they like.
Norm entrepreneurs might turn out to be effective, at least if the social dynamics, discussed below, work out in their favor. They might be able to signal not only their personal opposition to the norm, but also the existence of widespread (but hidden) opposition as well. The idea of a “silent majority” can be a helpfully precise way to signal such opposition. Importantly, norm entrepreneurs might also change the social meaning of compliance with the norm: if they succeed, such compliance might suggest a lack of independence and look a bit pathetic, whereas those who defy the norm might seem courageous, authentic, and tough.
It is important to emphasize that with small variations in starting points and inertia, resistance, or participation at the crucial points, social change may or may not happen. Suppose that a community has long had a norm in favor of discrimination based on sexual orientation; that many people in the community abhor that norm; that many others dislike it and that many others do not care about it; that many others are mildly inclined to favor it; and that many others firmly believe in it. If norm entrepreneurs make a public demonstration of opposition to the norm, and if the demonstration reaches those with relatively low thresholds for opposing it, opposition will immediately grow. If the growing opposition reaches those with relatively higher thresholds, the norm might rapidly collapse. But if the early public opposition is barely visible or if it reaches only those with relatively high thresholds, it will fizzle out and the norm might not even budge.
These are the two extreme cases. We could easily imagine intermediate cases in which the norm suffers a slow, steady death or in which the norm erodes but manages to survive. It is for this reason that otherwise similar communities can have multiple equilibria, understood here as apparently or actual stable situations governed by radically different norms. In some communities, people may recycle; in others, they may not. In some communities, people might drink a lot of liquor; in others, they might not.
After the fact, it is tempting to think that because of those different norms, the communities are not otherwise similar at all, and to insist on some fundamental cultural difference between them. But that thought might be a product of an illusion in the form of a failure to see that some small social influence, shock, or random event was responsible for the persistence of a norm in one community and its disintegration in another. History plays tricks, but because it is only run once, we do not see them.
Some of the most interesting work on social influences involves the existence of informational and reputational “cascades”; this work has obvious relevance to the revision of norms and eventually legal reform.27
For informational cascades, a starting point is that when individuals lack a great deal of private information (and sometimes even when they have such information), they are attentive to the information provided by the statements or actions of others. If A is unaware whether genetic modification of food is a serious problem, he may be moved in the direction of alarm if B seems to think that alarm is justified. If A and B believe that alarm is justified, C may end up thinking so too, at least if she lacks independent information to the contrary. If A, B, and C believe that genetic modification of food is a serious problem, D will need a good deal of confidence to reject their shared conclusion. The result of this process can be to produce cascade effects, as large groups of people eventually end up believing something, simply because other people seem to believe it too. It should be clear that cascade effects may or may not occur, depending on seemingly small factors, such as the initial distribution of beliefs, the order in which people announce what they think, and people’s thresholds for abandoning their private beliefs in deference to the views announced by others.
Though social cascades have been discussed largely in connection with factual judgments, the same processes are at work for norms; we can easily imagine norm cascades (information-induced or otherwise), which may well produce legal reform.28 Some such cascades may be a product of information; some may involve values. In such contexts, many people, lacking firm convictions of their own, may end up believing what (relevant) others seem to believe. Changes in social attitudes toward smoking, drinking, climate change, recycling, and sexual harassment have a great deal to do with these effects. And here as well, small differences in initial conditions, in thresholds for abandoning private beliefs because of reputational pressures, and in who hears what when, can lead to major differences in outcomes.
The availability heuristic,29 to which I will frequently return in this book, often plays a major role in norm cascades.30 The basic idea is that judgments about probability are often made by asking whether relevant events come to mind. If, for example, a particular case of egregious discrimination receives a great deal of public attention, then people might see or come to believe that such discrimination is widespread. In a variation on the availability heuristic, a single event might come to be highly salient, affecting not only probability judgments but also judgments about morality and norms. With respect to sexual harassment, Anita Hill’s widely publicized allegations about Clarence Thomas had a significant effect on public perceptions of sexual harassment in the 1980s. The #MeToo movement, which started in 2017, is analogous; prominent women, including the actresses Alyssa Milano, Ashley Judd, and Uma Thurman, drew attention to sexual harassment or sexual assault that many women faced, eventually creating a worldwide cascade.
Some people, including Hill and members of the #MeToo movement, serve as availability entrepreneurs; they emphasize particular incidents in an effort to produce an availability cascade, involving facts or norms. In many contexts, the effects of civil disobedience (of norms or law) are greatly magnified by the unduly aggressive responses of official targets; those responses tend to be publicized, and they signal that those who engaged in disobedience may well have been right. Consider the aggressive responses of state and local officials to civil disobedience by civil rights activitists. Martin Luther King Jr. was well aware that such responses could be helpful to the cause.
Thus far the discussion has emphasized purely informational pressures and informational cascades, where people care about what other people think because they do not know what to think, and they rely on the opinions of others, to learn what it is right to think. But with respect to norms, there can be reputational pressures and reputational cascades as well. People speak out or remain silent partly in order to preserve their reputations, even at the price of failing to say what they really think. Suppose, for example, that A believes that climate change is an extremely serious environmental problem; suppose too that B is skeptical. B may keep quiet, or even agree with A, simply to preserve A’s good opinion. C may see that A believes that climate change is a serious problem and that B seems to agree with A; C may therefore voice agreement even though privately she is skeptical or ambivalent.
It is easy to see how this kind of situation might occur in political life with, for example, politicians expressing their commitment to gun rights, to capital punishment, to stemming the flow of immigrants, to same-sex marriage, or to eliminating discrimination against transgender persons (even if they are privately skeptical). Here too the consequence can be cascade effects—large social movements in one direction or another—when a number of people appear to support a certain course of action simply because others (appear to) do so.
It is too simple, of course, to say that the objects of discrimination are opposed and silence themselves. Often that is true. But when discrimination is widespread and when norms support it, its objects might see discrimination as part of life’s furniture. In some cases, they might not even feel that their preferences and values have been constrained. Some preferences are adaptive; they are a product of existing injustice. If a victim of sexual harassment genuinely believes that “it’s not a big deal,” it might be because it’s most comfortable or easiest to believe that it’s not a big deal.
Consider Gordon Wood’s account of the pre-Revolutionary American colonies, when “common people” were “made to recognize and feel their subordination to gentlemen,” so that those “in lowly stations … developed what was called a ‘down look,’” and “knew their place and willingly walked while gentlefolk rode; and as yet they seldom expressed any burning desire to change places with their betters.”31 In Wood’s account, it is impossible to “comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness.”32
Wood argues that as republicanism took hold, social norms changed, and people stopped accepting their own lowliness. His account is one of a norm cascade, but not as a result of the revelation of preexisting preferences. Something different happened; people changed. With amazement, John Adams wrote that “Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated from so many Minds in so short a Time.”33 David Ramsay, one of the nation’s first historians (himself captured by the British during the American Revolution), marveled that Americans were transformed “from subjects to citizens,” and that was an “immense” difference because citizens “possess sovereignty. Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others.”34 Thomas Paine put it this way: “Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of a country. We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.”35
Adams, Ramsay, and Paine are speaking of new preferences, beliefs, and values, rather than the revelation of suppressed ones. How this happens remains imperfectly understood. While the idea of preference falsification captures much of the territory I am exploring, it is complemented by situations in which adaptive preferences are altered by new or revised norms.
There are also intermediate cases, involving what might be called partially adaptive preferences. These cases are especially interesting, not only because they are common but also because they create promising circumstances for rapid change.
Objects of discrimination, and others suffering from injustice or deprivation, may not exactly accept discrimination, injustice, or deprivation. They might live with it, and do so with a degree of equanimity, thinking that nothing can be done. It is not a lot of fun to beat your head against the wall. In cases of partially adaptive preferences, objects of discrimination are not like actors in a play; they are not falsifying their preferences. But they have a sense that something is wrong. They hear a small voice in their heads. The question is whether they try to silence that voice or instead try to find out exactly what it is saying.
Once norms change, some inchoate belief or value might be activated that was formerly suppressed or that was like that small voice in the head. It is fair enough to speak of liberation, but the case is not as simple as that of the law student at Columbia, who was entirely clear about what she thought. Partially adaptive preferences should be familiar. The task of norm entrepreneurs is to try to bring them out of the closet.
Thus far my focus has been on objects of discrimination. But as the case of the young men in Saudi Arabia suggests, discriminators are also affected by social norms. With respect to those who discriminate on the basis of sex and race (or other characteristics), we can imagine four kinds of cases:
In cases 1 and 3, there is no conflict between preferences and norms. Case 2 is the familiar one; norms are operating as leashes or constraints. Note that in such cases, discrimination will not be observed, at least if the relevant norms are effective. Discriminators will falsify their preferences, or at least not reveal them. They will act as if they do not want to discriminate, even though they do. At the same time, they might hope to change the norm, at least in their community, and the question is whether they can succeed. To do so, they might well have to act collectively. Their efforts are far more likely to succeed if they are highly publicized. (To be sure, some discriminators will simply defy the norm.)
Case 4 may be the most interesting one. Here too, many discriminators will falsify their preferences. As in the case of Saudi Arabian men, they will act as if they are sexist, even though they are not. (In human history, that has often happened.) Faced with the stated conflict, what can discriminators do, short of defying the norm?
Here as well, norm entrepreneurs can act to alter the norm. They can also ask for or enlist law. Consider a revealing fact: Some of the restaurants and hotels that that were regulated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually lobbied vigorously for the legislation.36 Why, you might ask, would such companies affirmatively seek to be forbidden by law from discriminating on the basis of race? If they did not want to discriminate on the basis of race, they certainly could have stopped doing so. Why did they need the law?
Norms help to explain what happened. The relevant companies had an antecedent preference: they wanted to make money. The best way to make money was to serve anyone who was willing to pay. For that reason, they did not want to discriminate. In fact, they wanted not to discriminate, because discrimination was costly on their part. But in light of prevailing norms, they would incur a high cost for not discriminating, which would provoke a hostile reaction in their community. As Lawrence Lessig writes, “For a white to serve or hire blacks was for the white to mark him or herself as having either a special greed for money or a special affection for blacks.”37 In these circumstances, the force of the law was needed to alter the social meaning of nondiscrimination. Once the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, nondiscrimination was a matter of compliance. Profit-making companies were liberated.
We can see related phenomena in other domains in which revised norms, or new laws, work to counteract discrimination. No one should doubt that many men who have engaged in sex discrimination did not want to do so, in the sense that they acted in accordance with norms that they did not endorse (and might have abhorred). As norm entrepreneurs began their work, norms started to change, and as law prohibited discriminatory behavior, such men could do what they wanted to do. Of course, this is far from a full picture of the consequence of new antidiscrimination norms. But it is part of it.
The phenomenon holds more broadly. Many people are glad that the law requires them to buckle their seatbelts because it enables them to do as they wish, and buckle up, without seeming to accuse people of being risky drivers. Many people support laws that forbid drug use in part because such laws make it easier for them to decline to use drugs. Many people support drunk-driving laws, in part because it enables them to decline to drive when they should not. New norms and norm revisions, and laws that codify them, can operate as precommitment strategies. They can help people to do what they want; previous norms stopped them from doing so.
Some norms reduce discrimination, but others increase it. Suppose that people have antecedent hostility toward members of social groups; suppose that social norms constrain them from speaking or acting in ways that reflect that hostility. This is a good side of “political correctness”; it prevents people from expressing ugly impulses. But norms that constrain sexism and racism are of course stronger in some times and places than in others, and they can be relaxed or eliminated. In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, many people feared that something of this kind had happened (and as of this writing, are fearing that it continues to happen). The concern is that President Trump is a norm entrepreneur; he is shifting norms in such a way as to weaken or eliminate their constraining effects. It is difficult to test that proposition in a rigorous way, but let’s consider a highly suggestive experiment.
Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago, Georgy Egorov of Northwestern University and Stefano Fiorin of the University of California at Los Angeles attempted to test whether Trump’s political success affected Americans’ willingness to support, in public, a xenophobic organization.38 Two weeks before the 2016 election, Bursztyn and his colleagues recruited 458 people from eight states that the website PredictWise said that Trump was certain to win (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Mississippi, West Virginia and Wyoming). Half the participants were told that Trump would win. The other half received no information about Trump’s projected victory.
All participants were then asked an assortment of questions, including whether they would authorize the researchers to donate one dollar to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, accurately described as an anti-immigrant organization, the founder of which has written, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”39 If participants agreed to authorize the donation, they were told that they would be paid an additional one dollar. Half the participants were assured that their decision to authorize a donation would be anonymous. The other half were given no such assurance. On the contrary, they were told that members of the research team might contact them, thus suggesting that their willingness to authorize the donation could become public.
For those who were not informed about Trump’s expected victory in their state, giving to the anti-immigration group was far more attractive when anonymity was assured: 54 percent authorized the donation under cover of secrecy as opposed to 34 percent when the authorization might become public. But for those who were informed that Trump would likely win, anonymity did not matter at all! When so informed, about half the participants were willing to authorize the donation regardless of whether they received a promise of anonymity. The central point is that information about Trump’s expected victory altered social norms, making many people far more willing to give publicly and eliminating the comparatively greater popularity of anonymous endorsements.
As an additional test, Bursztyn and his colleagues repeated their experiment in the same states during the first week after Trump’s 2016 election. They found that Trump’s victory also eliminated the effects of anonymity: again, about half the participants authorized the donation regardless of whether the authorization would be public. The general conclusion is that if Trump had not come on the scene, many Americans would refuse to authorize a donation to an anti-immigrant organization unless they were promised anonymity. But with Trump as president, people feel liberated. Anonymity no longer matters, apparently because Trump’s election has weakened the social norm against supporting anti-immigrant groups. It is now more acceptable to be known to agree “that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
The central finding can be seen as the mirror image of the tale of the law student and the law professor. For a certain number of people, hostility to anti-immigrant groups is a private matter; they do not want to voice that hostility in public. But if norms are seen to be weakening or to be shifting, they will be willing to give voice to their beliefs. The case of the Saudi Arabian men is essentially the same.
We can easily imagine much uglier versions of the central finding. When police brutality increases, when hateful comments or action are directed at members of certain religious groups, when white supremacy marches start, when ethnic violence breaks out, when mass atrocities occur, and when genocide is threatened, one reason is the weakening or transformation of social norms that once made the relevant actions unthinkable.40 In some such cases, what was akin to a tax has been eliminated; in other cases, what was akin to a tax has been transformed into something like a subsidy. The subsidy might be necessary to spur the destructive behavior, but for some participants, removal of the tax is enough.
My emphasis has been on situations in which people have an antecedent preference or value, whose expression a norm blocks; revision of the norm liberates them so that they can talk or act as they wish. Sexual desires may be the most obvious example, where people may be startled to find out what they like, though in that context, there can be a complex interplay between discovery and construction of preferences. (The 2017 Netflix television series Gypsy is a brilliant exploration of that topic.) For sexual desires, the weakening of norms can and does produce a kind of unleashing, as people feel free to acknowledge to others, and to express, preferences that had been hidden. Sometimes people do not even acknowledge those preferences to themselves, and it takes a comment, an image, or a partner to unleash them.
But I have also noted that some norms are internalized, so that people do not feel chained at all. Once the norm is revised, they speak or act differently, either because they feel constrained by the new norm to do that, or because their preferences and values change. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a chilling tale of something like that, with its terrifying closing lines: “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”41
That is the dark side. But let’s return to the case of sexual harassment. Many men are appalled by the very thought of sexual harassment. For them, norms and legal rules against sexual harassment are not a problem, any more than norms and legal rules against theft and assault are a problem. If they are older, some of these men might have experienced a shift over the course of their lives. If they are younger, some of these men might not be able to imagine a context in which sexually harassing someone would be a fun or good experience.
For such men, we do not have cases of preference falsification. For some of them, it might be helpful and clarifying to speak of adaptive preferences. But it is better to say that the relevant people are deeply committed to the norm in principle, so that defying it would not merely be costly; it would be unthinkable.
Something similar can be said for many actions that conform to social norms. Most people are not bothered by the social norm against dueling. For many people, seatbelt buckling and recycling are not properly characterized as costs; they are a matter of routine, and for those who buckle their seatbelts or recycle, the relevant actions may well feel like a benefit. When the social norm is one of considerateness, those who are considerate usually do not feel themselves to be shackled; they want to be considerate. When this is so, the situation will be stable. Norm entrepreneurs cannot point to widespread, but hidden, dissatisfaction with the norm. But for both insiders and outsiders, it will often be difficult to distinguish between situations in which norms are internalized and situations in which they merely seem to be. That is one reason that stunning surprises are inevitable.