The Enhancement of Social Norm Compliance: Prospects and Caveats

Societies are characterized by a shared system of social norms, which promotes cooperation among people. However, following social norms often means going against self-interest—imagine, for example, being required to choose whether or not to get richer from an unfair deal; ignoring social norms, on the other hand, may elicit disruptive antisocial behaviors that damage human relationships. Therefore, this type of value-based decisions is particularly tough and requires a complex trade-off between self- and other-regarding motivations. The advancement in cognitive neuroscience has shed light on the mechanisms underlying social norm compliance, describing the interplay between the emotional, reward, and self-control systems in shaping social norm preference (Fehr and Camerer, Evolution and Human Behavior 25(2), 63–87, 2007). The modulation of these systems, in particular self-control areas like dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), through TMS and tDCS has proven to be effective in modifying people’s behavior in socio-economic contexts (Knoch et al., Science 314(5800), 829–832, 2006; Knoch et al., Cerebral Cortex 18(9), 1987–1990, 2008; Ruff et al., Science 342(6157), 482–484, 2013). The scope of the current paper is to discuss the potential benefits of the enhancement of social norm compliance in the context of therapeutic interventions, along with the issues of methodological, theoretical, and moral nature that may arise when considering the very definition of social norm: indeed, the benchmark for deciding what is right and what is wrong is not always easy to determine in the social context, and thus, the implications of proposing interventions aimed at modulating social norm compliance, although definitely promising, should also be considered carefully.