Social Norms
Social norms are the entrenched, population-level expressions of Contextualisation — the point at which an individually learned way of expressing an Evolved Impulses becomes a shared, self-perpetuating cultural pattern, maintained through social and cultural selection.
How norms form and spread
Marketing, media and entertainment industries contextualise, model, and perpetuate behaviours and norms through narrative — film, games, books — often without any intentionality or consideration of their influence. Even well-meaning attempts can unconsciously model and perpetuate MTI society's ecologically destructive norms. Social-convention research shows a catalytic threshold around 25% adoption of a new norm in a population, beyond which adoption accelerates — the mechanism credited with transforming drink driving from commonplace (performed by over half of male drivers) to viewed as unacceptable by 92% of a population within decades.
Norms as leverage for intervention
Because storytelling and modelled behaviour shape appetites and norms so effectively, Paper One argues the marketing, media and entertainment industries — already responsible for creating and exacerbating the behavioural crisis — may be humanity's best available tool for reversing it, by intentionally modelling new, ecologically restorative norms rather than status- and consumption-maximising ones.