Norm Psychology in the Digital Age: How Social Media Shapes the Cultural Evolution of Normativity

How do people think about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden? Heyes’s “cognitive gadgets” account of norm psychology proposes that cultural selection affects not just the content of norms but also how people think and feel about norms in general. Contra nativist views that paint human normativity as genetically inherited and evolving at a glacial pace, Heyes’s model suggests that people alive today have substantially more control over how future generations think about norms and their enforcement.