The Pyramid of Social Norms : A New Perspective

The legal literature on social norms is at a crossroads. While we seem to have a grasp of the nature and potency of social norms, we still lack understanding of their structure and the factors that cause them to emerge or wither away. In this essay, I posit that a promising way to proceed from this crossroads is to take the path not (yet) taken by lawyers and legal economists. The theory of values and value dimensions in cross-cultural psychology offers a systematic framework for laying the foundations to a more robust theory of social norms. The underlying insight of this essay is straightforward: I argue that values are the core terms of social norms. They may be likened to building blocks of a socio-genetic code that every modern society is endowed with. The cultural profile of each society affects its members' personal utility functions as well as its social institutions. It therefore defines the setting in which more concrete norms evolve. In the metaphorical pyramid of social norms, values constitute the lower strata and concrete social norms are found at higher strata. This essay outlines the notional model of the pyramid of social norms and demonstrates its contribution to debates over emergence and evolution of social norms and over social norms and the law