APS Box — Norms Are Coordination Constraints

Social norms are often described as rules, conventions, customs, or obligations.

APS interprets norms more fundamentally as coordination constraints.

Norms help stabilise expectations concerning behaviour. By reducing uncertainty, they make coordinated activity more reliable and easier to sustain across time.

Norms therefore contribute directly to organised persistence.

Without normative constraints, social coordination would require continual renegotiation. Communication would become less reliable, cooperation more fragile, and continuity more difficult to maintain.

Norms are important not because they impose order from above, but because they help stabilise coordinated activity among interacting organisms.

Norms are constraints that make continuity possible.