Custom can be challenged
Norms still emerge from practice. However, norm entrepreneurs and committed minorities keep them contested and do not let any convention settle.
Scroll the diagram sideways to see all of it.
aiag/customary/contested_custom.pyimport aiag
# The 2 approaches of Contested custom, with the classes that carry them out
for approach in aiag.approaches(locus="cust", conflict="contest"):
print(approach)pip install aiagaiag/customary/contested_custom.py Every method in aiag Library on GitHub
Limitation
Norms that are always contested never stay stable long enough for anyone to rely on them. What was acceptable yesterday may not be acceptable today. This regime gives up Fuller's constancy requirement, which holds that rules must stay stable enough for people to plan around them.
When people disagree about a claim, this approach first identifies which raters habitually rate things differently. It then keeps only the annotations that both groups independently rate as helpful. The disagreement is settled by requiring endorsement from both sides rather than by majority vote. One system selects among notes that people have already written. A later system has a language model draft new notes and scores them against a learned stand-in for a divided audience. Because a population's judgments keep changing, the fit is redone as new ratings arrive. A further proposal makes this drift an explicit variable, so that the target is re-estimated over time instead of fixed at one measurement.
Instead of writing the custom down, this approach sets up a population of model agents that already follows one. Conformity, dissent, rebuke, and pressure from minorities then shape the norm, so the norm in force is whatever the group arrives at. The studies so far run this mechanism and record what it produces. Agents publicly go along with norms they privately reject, a single dissenter can break a false consensus, a peer's sanction can teach the norm, and a committed minority can pull a whole population toward its position. A response function calibrated on the population's ordinary behavior forecasts how far this shift goes. All of this work stops at simulation. The group dynamics are actually run and characterized, but no system yet aligns a deployed model this way.
Norm entrepreneurs are individuals or groups who deliberately campaign to change a norm, making the previously unsayable sayable. They can trigger cascades in which the whole population switches norms.
Past a threshold, a small group that refuses to change its position can overturn the majority's convention. Custom is therefore not only majority rule, and an unwavering minority can actively shape how norms change.
Customs gain authority from long usage (prescription) and lose it by falling out of use (desuetude). Age and practice, rather than enactment, are what make a custom binding and what end its binding force.