It occurs to me this is connecting to the concepts in From Personal to Prison Gangs: Enforcing Prosocial Behavior. That post notes how dramatically increasing the number of prisoners in a prison means the prisoners have a much harder time establishing trust and reputation, because there’s too many people to keep track of. The result is prison gangs: gang leaders are few enough they can manage trust between each other, and then they are responsible for ensuring their gang members follow “the rules.”
At some point over the past couple hundred years, society underwent a transition similar to that of the California prison system.
In 1800, people were mostly farmers, living in small towns. The local population was within an order of magnitude of Dunbar’s number, and generally small enough to rely on reputation for day-to-day dealings.
Today, that is not the case [citation needed].
Just as in prisons and companies, we should expect this change to drive two kinds of transitions:
A transition from informal, decentralized rules to formal, written, centrally-enforced rules.
A transition from individual to group-level identity.
This can explain an awful lot of the ways in which society has changed over the past couple hundred years, as well as how specific social institutions evolve over time. To take just a few examples…
Regulation. As people have more one-off interactions, reputation becomes less tenable, and we should expect formal regulation to grow. Conversely, regulations are routinely ignored among people who know each other.
Litigation. Again, with more one-off interactions, we should expect people to rely more on formal litigation and less on informal settlement. Conversely, people who interact frequently rarely sue each other—and when they do, it’s expected to mess up the relationship.
Professional licensing. Without reputation, people need some way to signal that they are safe to hire. We should expect licensing to increase as pairwise interactions decrease.
Credentialism. This is just a generalization of licensing. As reputation fails, we should expect people to rely more heavily on formal credentials—“you are your degree” and so forth.
Stereotyping. Without past interactions with a particular person, we should expect people to generalize based on superficially “similar” people. This could be anything from the usual culprits (race, ethnicity, age) to job roles (actuaries, lawyers) to consumption signals (iphone, converse, fancy suit).
Tribalism. From nationalism to sports fans to identity politics, an increasing prevalence of group-level identity means an increasing prevalence of tribal behavior. In particular, I’d expect that social media outlets with more one-off or low-count interactions are characterized by more extreme tribalism.
Standards for impersonal interactions. “Professionalism” at work is a good example.
I’ve focused mostly on negative examples here, but it’s not all bad—even some of these examples have upsides. When California’s prisons moved from an informal code to prison gangs, the homicide rate dropped like a rock; the gangs hate prison lockdowns, so they go to great lengths to prevent homicides. Of course, gangs have lots of downsides too. The point which generalizes is this: bodies with centralized power have their own incentives, and outcomes will be “good” to exactly the extent that the incentives of the centralized power align with everybody else’ incentives and desires.
It occurs to me this is connecting to the concepts in From Personal to Prison Gangs: Enforcing Prosocial Behavior. That post notes how dramatically increasing the number of prisoners in a prison means the prisoners have a much harder time establishing trust and reputation, because there’s too many people to keep track of. The result is prison gangs: gang leaders are few enough they can manage trust between each other, and then they are responsible for ensuring their gang members follow “the rules.”