Why are people so darn cooperative? Among economists, a popular answer has been: social norms, enforced by peer punishment. In a new paper, we devised an experiment to investigate the dark side of this mechanism. Social norms can be destructive, and punishment can lock societies into bad norms...
Although collectives manage to do something that resembles the functional package of agency overall, they achieve this without any clear, isolatable analogue of beliefs, intentions, and the like. So we cannot identify any analogous failure of those "organs", even if we are confident that the package as a whole has failed. Collectives can be agents, and they can be subject to failures of agency. But their failures may not be classifiable as either ignorance or weakness of will.
… the speaker in a research presentation can expect to benefit more than the audience. The idea is somehow that the audience is there to ask questions which will help the speaker sharpen the argument, that the presentation will be an opportunity for enhancing the prestige of the speaker and generally satisfying his or her ego. All good for the speaker, to be sure; but the audience won't really learn much.
