Four Social Worlds
☝️This is an excerpt from my textbook, Values-Based Social Design.
My job is to help people design better social environments and systems, both online and offline. This means distilling academic work from many fields into an intuitive sense — something that works automatically as teams shape their apps, policies, and social ideas — guiding them away from common errors.
I’ll try to do that in this essay by connecting ideas from many fields, including behavioral psychology, the sociology of norms, game theory, and the philosophy of values. I’ll give you a way to apply and combine them intuitively in your daily life.
In my work, I usually do this a different way. I teach an online class and use group exercises and participatory practices. But here, I’ll try an imaginative essay that you can go through solo.
I’ll take four factors which shape social environments, and I’ll paint four imaginary worlds. In each, world, one social factor is dominant:
- 💍 the realm of social expectations from sociology, a world of norms, social modeling, and ideology
- 🕵️♂️ the realm of pure perception from psychology, a world of behavior
- 🌳 the realm of pure appreciation from philosophy, a world of values
