To any individual in a group, it can easily be the case that they think the group standard seems dumb, but in a situation of risk aversion, the important part is that you do things that look to everyone like the kind of thing that others would think is part of the standard. In practice this boils down to a very limited kind of reasoning where you do things that look vaguely associated with whatever you think the standard is, often without that standard being grounded in much of any robust internal logic. And doing things that are inconsistent with the actual standard upon substantial reflection do not actually get punished, as long as they look like the kind of behavior that looks like it was generated by someone trying to follow the standard.
Here is my own spin on this idea:
We often defer at least somewhat to common sense. Unfortunately, we face uncertainty both about the question at hand, and about what our friends and neighbors consider to be common sense. What’s worse is that, even though each of us has an individual perspective, we often conflate our personal observations with our deferent, all-things-considered, common-sense best guess.
The result is that what settles in as “common sense” is often very different from the average of our individual observations—it’s a woefully inaccurate narrative that caught on by chance. The reason it doesn’t go away is that even this inaccurate narrative does reflect just enough real wisdom that we’re still better off deferring to it than just going our own way. We comply with common sense—and our own decisions turn out better than those of our neighbors who don’t heed it.
Yet that only entrenches the inaccurate narrative further. We’d all be better off getting together, being open and honest about our individual perspectives, and creating a new, more accurate form of common sense. Unfortunately, this is often very difficult to do. Inaccurate narratives about common sense perpetuate themselves, and the group suffers.
Here is my own spin on this idea:
We often defer at least somewhat to common sense. Unfortunately, we face uncertainty both about the question at hand, and about what our friends and neighbors consider to be common sense. What’s worse is that, even though each of us has an individual perspective, we often conflate our personal observations with our deferent, all-things-considered, common-sense best guess.
The result is that what settles in as “common sense” is often very different from the average of our individual observations—it’s a woefully inaccurate narrative that caught on by chance. The reason it doesn’t go away is that even this inaccurate narrative does reflect just enough real wisdom that we’re still better off deferring to it than just going our own way. We comply with common sense—and our own decisions turn out better than those of our neighbors who don’t heed it.
Yet that only entrenches the inaccurate narrative further. We’d all be better off getting together, being open and honest about our individual perspectives, and creating a new, more accurate form of common sense. Unfortunately, this is often very difficult to do. Inaccurate narratives about common sense perpetuate themselves, and the group suffers.