Pure Social Norms and the Seinfeldian In-town Courtesy Call

The funny thing about the cliché “it’s funny because it’s true” is that it’s true. Take, for example, the TV show Seinfeld. I was never a huge fan, but what seemed to give the show such broad appeal was that it identified so many quirks of human behavior that persist as strong social norms despite their apparent irrationality (thus setting up the next generation of humor in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David created oodles of awkward-tainment by openly violating those norms).

Even the silliest of the Seinfeldian social norms, though, have some kind of plausible explanation or intuitive appeal behind them, even if they don’t make perfect sense. Consider the mania about holding elevators in an office building. In the famous scene where George lets an elevator door close in the face of an oncoming person, Seinfeld gets the courtesy exactly right: there’s a strong expectation that people in the elevator hold the door, and it is perceived as particularly rude about letting the door close as you watch them desperately run toward you. But there’s something sensible about this: your minimal effort of holding the door for a few seconds might save that onrushing person a lot more time that they’d otherwise spend waiting for the elevator to return, so the courtesy seems to work as a simple welfarist matter (i.e., it's Kaldor-Hicks if not Pareto optimal).

But there’s one rule of social behavior lampooned in Seinfeld that I could never make any sense of, because it seems untethered to--and possibly inconsistent with--any practical explanations or instincts about courtesy.  I say more about what this norm is and whether it may signal a category of "pure" social norms below the fold.

The norm that has me nonplussed is the rule that out-of-town visitors should contact their friends and relatives who live in the town they’re visiting to say hello—even if they don’t have the time or interest to actually meet them in person (you may recall that Jerry violated this rule with respect to (I think) his Uncle Leo, to Leo’s great offense—he was all like “if you’re in town, you gotta call me”, yada yada yada). This may seem like a fictional invention, but it persists at least amid some subset of the population. I know this because I've been on the receiving end of it a few times, including just the other day. A friend sent an email saying “Hey, I’m in LA. How are things?” I wrote back suggesting that we meet up (which I sort of assumed was the point of the original email), and the response came: “No time to meet up. Just saying hello.” I was baffled and kind of offended in equal part.

The reason this baffles me is that, unlike the elevator-door norm, I can’t come up with a plausible, practical explanation for the obligatory in-town courtesy call. You’re no more or less capable of calling or emailing out-of-town friends when you’re in their neck of the woods (although maybe it's a holdover from the pre-cellphone days when local calls were significantly cheaper?). And as my story above suggests, the in-town courtesy call norm may actually come off as discourteous; it seems to emphasize to someone that their friend or relative is not interested in seeing them during their time in the same city ("Hi, I'm in town, and I just wanted to call and let you know that I won't be making time for you."  Ouch!).

So I write this for a pair of reasons. The first is to canvas the blogosphere to see if there is some intuition or practical explanation behind the Seinfeldian in-town courtesy call that has thus far escaped me. And if not, the second is to query whether this conduct falls into a category I’ve come to think of as the “pure” social norm. The pure social norm is an expectation about social behavior that persists despite its neither having any instinctive moral force, nor having a plausible practical explanation. It's a norm for norm's sake.   Does such a category exist? Is this kind of norm distinguishable from other ones? Should we act in a way that intentionally frustrates pure social norms in order to extirpate their wasteful presence from our lives? These are the things Seinfeld makes me think about. What the hell is wrong with me?