The first is that I expect the Western countries are much more familiar with the concept of psychological tests and games. I therefore suspect that they are more likely to be thinking that this is a game, and it has a score, and obviously you should try to win.
The second is based on my experiences in Baghdad; when we walked around the city we noticed mounds of trash everywhere, and so we expected the homes to be in bad shape inside. This was a mistake; the inside of a Baghdadi home was always immaculate. The conclusion I drew was that they just weren’t drawing their sense of obligation from geography; there was no sense of neighborhood, only of family and tribe. I therefore expect that at least the people from Muscat and Riyadh don’t react much to any kind of signals from strangers, because they didn’t have any expectations in the first place. This is often what people are measuring when they say ‘norms of civic cooperation and rule of law’.
Interesting point about the attitude to games. However, I guess the boundary between a game and reality may be fuzzy. People trading on stock exchange may treat it as a game. People planning a war may treat it as a game.
You may be right about the norms of social norms though. If you look how the authors measured civic cooperation it looks more like “trust in the state” metric. From the paper: “social norms are norms of civic cooperation as they are expressed in people’s attitudes to tax evasion, abuse of the welfare state, or dodging fares on public transport”.
I have two opposing suspicions about this.
The first is that I expect the Western countries are much more familiar with the concept of psychological tests and games. I therefore suspect that they are more likely to be thinking that this is a game, and it has a score, and obviously you should try to win.
The second is based on my experiences in Baghdad; when we walked around the city we noticed mounds of trash everywhere, and so we expected the homes to be in bad shape inside. This was a mistake; the inside of a Baghdadi home was always immaculate. The conclusion I drew was that they just weren’t drawing their sense of obligation from geography; there was no sense of neighborhood, only of family and tribe. I therefore expect that at least the people from Muscat and Riyadh don’t react much to any kind of signals from strangers, because they didn’t have any expectations in the first place. This is often what people are measuring when they say ‘norms of civic cooperation and rule of law’.
Interesting point about the attitude to games. However, I guess the boundary between a game and reality may be fuzzy. People trading on stock exchange may treat it as a game. People planning a war may treat it as a game.
You may be right about the norms of social norms though. If you look how the authors measured civic cooperation it looks more like “trust in the state” metric. From the paper: “social norms are norms of civic cooperation as they are expressed in people’s attitudes to tax evasion, abuse of the welfare state, or dodging fares on public transport”.