A prevailing view in the literature states that social sanctions can support, in equilibrium, high levels of obedience to a costly norm. The reason is that social disapproval and stigmatization faced by the disobedient are highest when disobedience is the exception rather than the rule in society. In contrast, the Bayesian model introduced here shows that, imperfect information causes the expected social sanction to be lowest precisely when obedience is more common. This, amongst other findings, draws a distinct line between social and moral norms, both of which may depend on others’ behavior but not on action observability. The implications of the use of non-Bayesian belief formation rules by society, namely a representativeness rule (overweighting the signals) and conservativism (overweighting the prior), for payoff functions and equilibria are explored.

文献中盛行的观点认为，社会制裁可以均衡地支持对昂贵准则的高度服从。原因是，当不服从是社会的例外而不是规则时，不服从的人所面临的社会不满和污名化最高。相反，这里介绍的贝叶斯模型表明，不完全的信息导致服从更为普遍时，预期的社会制裁恰恰是最低的。除其他发现外，这在社会规范和道德规范之间划出了界线，这两者都可能取决于他人的行为，而不取决于行动的可观察性。社会使用非贝叶斯信念形成规则的含义，即代表性规则（对信号的权重过大）和保守主义（对先验的权重过高），