Soziale Normen als Signale. Der Beitrag der Signaling-Theorie

Why do people pierce themselves, get tattoos, buy overpriced worn-out jeans, wear designer clothes, or engage in other costly but socially accepted behavior? While coordination and cooperation norms can be explained by rational choice theory, a third category of norms, signaling norms, have largely been neglected. At first it appears difficult to explain the emergence of social norms prescribing seemingly self-destructive or wasteful behavior. However, signaling theory constitutes the basis for understanding the emergence and evolution of signaling norms and offers an innovative approach in sociological theory. In this article we present the main tenets of signaling theory and based on Posner (2000) we also develop a game theoretical model to identifying the conditions for the emergence and evolution of social norms.