The Problem of Social Order
The problem of social order
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Why doesn’t our world resemble The
Road Warrior?
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Why is social life mostly so predictable?
Why do people
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Look out for one another?
Conform to social rules?
Make and obey laws?
Make investments in future ventures?
Social order in insect societies
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Worker ants sacrifice their lives on behalf of
the colony
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Ant supercolonies
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Workers of one North African species of ants face
virtual suicide in foraging for food
In Europe, an Argentine species covers 6000 km;
comprises millions of nests, billions of individual
workers
Mechanism: high degree of genetic
relatedness, combined with chemical
signaling of this relatedness
Explanation
Explanation: inclusive fitness
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Among social insects, sisters share 75% of
their genes
Among most animals, sisters only share 50% of
their genes
Critique
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Helps explain mother-child bond in
human society
Cannot account for cooperation among
non-related individuals
Two components of social order
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Order as coordination
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Disorder as lack of coordination
Order as cooperation
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Disorder as lack of cooperation
Social order, cont’d
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Coordination
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Predictability allows people to develop
stable expectations, which in turn enable
them to coordinate.
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EG driving
EG the value of money
Disorder from lack of
predictability
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Financial crises
Examples of coordination
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Traffic
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Everyone drives on the right and passes on
the left
Availability of consumer goods
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Food in the stores
Cooperation
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People do things that benefit others,
not just themselves
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EG NPR donations, volunteer work
EG Refrain from taking other’s property,
refrain from polluting
Disorder from lack of
cooperation
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Montegrano, Southern Italy, ca. 1950, pop =
3400 (Banfield. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society)
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There is only one voluntary association
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No organized charities
Churches do not carry out welfare or charitable activities

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a clubroom where 25 upper class men play cards
Hardly anyone puts money on the collection plate at
church
People don’t understand the concept of publicspiritedness – says that no one in town is public-spirited
Montegrano: political activity
is feeble
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Political parties are weak
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People are too individualistic to care about
mobilizing others for any collective purpose
Political cynicism is extreme
Montegrano: collective needs
are unmet
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Because there is so little collective
action, most collective needs are unmet
in Montegrano
‘Amoral familism’
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Still characteristic of Southern Italy, as
compared with Northern Italy
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R. Putnam, Making Democracy Work
Example of cooperative order
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New York, and the entire U.S., in the
wake of the events of September 11th

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Volunteers flooded Ground Zero
NY businesses gave free food to rescuers
and victims
Celebrities raised money for the victims in
a huge telethon
What makes cooperation difficult
to attain?
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People are social
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They need others to be happy and healthy
People are also individual
Cooperation, cont’d
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So, there is tension between the
interests of the individual and the
interests of the group
Recap
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The problem of social order is a key
issue in the social sciences and in public
policy
In order to create the world we want,
we need to have social order
Recap
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Social order includes two components:
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Coordination (predictability)
Cooperation (overcoming individual selfinterest)
In this course, we will discuss five
theoretical solutions to the problem of
social order