The Point Blog

There are four broad categories of campaigns on The Point: ultimatums, fundraisers, events, and social contracts. They share the same basic elements (a target, goal, tipping point, and action), but are used for substantially different purposes. This post on the social contract is the first in a series of posts highlighting the charms of the different campaign types.

A social contract is an agreement among campaign members. I’ll do something, but only if you and everyone else will cooperate. A social contract is a self-imposed law, like a cantilever bridge ¹, upheld only by the integrity of its internal parts.

Unlike laws, social contracts aren’t enforced by the threat of punishment. So why would anyone adhere to them? Consider this passage from Thomas Schelling’s 1978 masterpiece, “Micromotives and Macrobehavior:”

Shortly after Teddy Green of the Bruins took a hockey stick to his brain, *Newsweek* (October 6, 1969), commented:

Players will not adopt helmets by individual choice for several reasons. Chicago star Bobby Hull cites the simplest factor: “Vanity.” But many players honestly believe that helmets will cut their efficiency and put them at a disadvantage, and others fear ridicule of opponents. The use of helmets will spread only through fear caused by injuries like Green’s — or through a rule making them mandatory … One player summed up the feelings of many: “It’s foolish not to wear a helmet. But I don’t — because the other guys don’t. I know that’s silly, but most of the players feel the same way. If the league made us do it, though, we’d all wear them and nobody would mind.”

Prisoner’s Dilemma

In one way or another, social customs influence everyone’s behavior. If we want to fit in, we specifically conform to customs. If we want to be weird, we specifically don’t. Either way, social customs preempt normal rational decision making by making us answer the question, “how do I want to appear?, “instead of the more fundamental, “how do I want to behave?” Schelling illustrates this phenomenon with the following graph:

• L & R represents the two sides of a binary choice. In our example, L is, “I will not wear a helmet,” and R is “I will wear a helmet.”
• The x axis represents the total number of people (of n possible) choose R. So when x = 0, no one wears a helmet. When x = n, everyone wears a helmet.
• For every value of x, y represents the welfare of choosing L or R.

The state of highest welfare is at x = n, when everyone chooses to wear a helmet. But right now, we’re at x = 0, and L is the better choice. Moving to R makes you significantly worse off. Only if t people select R will it be the better choice.

So how do you get to t? Sadly, you don’t. Not usually. It’s why we do a lot of things that no one really likes doing, because no one can figure out how to get to t. This general situation has been coined the prisoner’s dillemma — when each person acting in their own immediate self interest makes everyone worse off.

One way to get to t is by passing laws, hence the hockey player longing for a league-imposed rule. But laws regulating personal decisions are rare; Americans are exceptionally sensitive to infringements on their freedom to choose ².

Jump the Hump

The Point’s tipping action model eliminates the prisoner’s dilemma of social contracts. People can express their preference for R — anonymously, if need be — without the consequences of actually choosing R until t people select it. No one has to traverse the hump from x = 0 to x = t — it’s simply bypassed. Had The Point been at his disposal, Bobby Hull might have started a campaign stating, “I will wear a helmet, but only if 200 other players agree to wear a helmet as well.”

Use social contracts to eliminate the fruitless vectors of competition. Reach the tipping point, and the strange and the status quo are flipped.

A few examples of how I’d like to use The Point’s social contract:

Clothing

Like most men, I don’t really care about my appearance. Why try to compete in an area where I have an innate disadvantage? But since it’s impossible to get dressed without engaging in choice to some degree, I’ve developed a system that guides my decisions: I wear whatever draws the least amount of attention to itself.

Completely neutralizing fashion is way more complex than it sounds. If I’m too sharp or too scruffy, it will make someone think something about me. I need to closely monitor trends and nimbly adapt to the narrow margin in between. It takes a lot of energy to go unnoticed.

So, I suggest we call the whole thing off with a social contract: I will wear nothing but t-shirts and jeans ³ if 100 million Americans will do it with me.

Toothpaste

I spend at least five minutes every time I buy toothpaste evaluating my choices. I am on a quest for The Perfect Toothpaste Experience, which I deeply believe exists, though it has coyly eluded me thus far (The worst part is, making fun of myself here won’t stop me from doing this again).

Toothpaste is the quintessential example of a market that has overestimated our need for choice. I have probably tried 100 different toothpastes, and can’t say that one of them was any better than any other one. They all rank exactly the same. So I propose a moratorium on the toothpaste wars — let the toothpaste manufacturers of the world form a social contract agreeing to stop inventing new kinds of toothpaste. Let’s agree to a one year disarmament plan that ends with an equitable division of the surviving properties: Crest gets peppermint, Aquafresh gets spearmint, and Colgate gets mint (which, according to their website, is neither peppermint nor spearmint).

Countless Examples

I have to stop myself now. I just deleted like 20 more examples from this post because apparently I can’t get though two of them without collapsing into a rant.

Over and over, you’ll find yourself in situations with others, behaving in a way that, deep down, you all find kind of pointless. As far as I know, The Point is the only model for solving problems like these.