Deshimaru SakaguchiResearch Notes
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When Reasons Evaporate: Why Rules Survive After Their Original Purpose Is Gone

Date
2026-09-06
Status
working
Epistemic status
mixed
Authority
working-note
Working Research Note. This document is provisional, not peer reviewed, and should not be treated as the author’s final published position.

Question

Why do rules continue to survive after the reasons that originally made them useful have disappeared?

This question matters to me because it appears in many forms.

A household habit can outlive the physical constraint that created it. A workplace procedure can survive the technology that once made it necessary. A taboo can remain binding after its ecological context has been forgotten. A promise made under fear can continue to govern a person long after the original danger is gone.

At first glance, these cases can look like simple irrationality.

The working question behind this note is whether that description is too shallow.

What if the persistence of apparently reasonless rules is partly a side effect of mechanisms that are normally useful for preserving knowledge, reducing risk, maintaining coordination, and sustaining group continuity?

That was the direction I was exploring when I assembled the research behind this note.

Thinking Context

I cannot identify a single origin for this question.

It was already present in my work in different forms before I began this particular research pass. It had appeared in thinking about inherited promises, organizational procedures, social norms, and historical institutions. It also resurfaced repeatedly in conversations with people and with AI systems.

At some point the question became explicit enough to investigate directly:

What happens when the reason for a rule disappears, but the rule remains?

The research process then moved through cultural evolution, developmental psychology, ritual cognition, organizational sociology, and institutional theory.

The path was not linear.

I am therefore not treating any one book, paper, conversation, or AI response as the origin of the idea. What I can document is that these bodies of research were part of the exploration at this stage.

Sources Consulted

The exploratory research drew on material related to:

The exploratory source set also contained secondary webpages, summaries, repositories, and other materials used to locate possible sources.

For that reason, the source list itself should not be read as a verified bibliography.

Verified Primary Sources

At the time represented by this note, source verification was mixed.

Several lines of inquiry pointed to identifiable primary research, but the exploratory research document also relied on secondary material and AI-assisted source discovery.

Before any strong empirical claim from this note is used in a paper, the relevant primary source should be checked directly.

One useful example of why this matters emerged during the research itself.

The popular story about five monkeys, a ladder, bananas, and cold water is widely repeated as if it were a laboratory demonstration of inherited rules. The research trail did not support that claim. It instead pointed to a much narrower 1967 primate-learning study by Gordon R. Stephenson involving socially transmitted avoidance.

That distinction is important.

A good story can preserve a useful intuition while still being false as a description of the underlying experiment.

This note should not reproduce that mistake at a more sophisticated level.

What I Found Interesting

1. Arbitrary norms can outlive the people who introduced them

The laboratory microculture work associated with Jacobs and Campbell was important to this line of thought because it examined what happens when an initially arbitrary judgment is transmitted through successive replacement of group members.

The interesting feature is not merely conformity.

It is that a norm can become part of the environment encountered by newcomers. The newcomers do not experience the original moment in which the norm was introduced. They encounter only a social world in which the norm is already present.

This changes the epistemic situation.

A rule that was once someone's choice can later appear to another person as simply how reality is.

2. Institutionalization may make a convention look increasingly objective

Zucker's work suggested another step.

When a practice becomes attached to institutional roles and organizational context, people may experience it less as a local preference and more as an external social fact.

That distinction matters for rule persistence.

The question changes from:

Why are we doing this?

to something closer to:

How is this done here?

Once that transition occurs, asking for the original reason may itself begin to feel misplaced.

3. Human cultural learning is designed to preserve more than immediately visible causality

The work on overimitation was especially relevant.

In some experimental settings, human children reproduce actions that appear unnecessary for achieving an observable goal. This differs from a purely efficiency-seeking strategy in which a learner removes every step that appears causally irrelevant.

At first this seems inefficient.

But if a learner cannot see the full causal structure, deleting apparently unnecessary steps may be dangerous.

The larger cultural-evolution question is therefore not:

Why are humans so bad at removing useless actions?

It may also be:

How could cumulative culture survive if every learner freely deleted any step whose purpose they personally failed to understand?

This reframes faithful imitation as both a strength and a potential source of later rigidity.

4. Causal opacity may change how an action is interpreted

The distinction between an instrumental stance and a ritual stance was useful here.

When an action is interpreted instrumentally, variation can be evaluated by whether it improves the result.

When an action is interpreted as a convention, ritual, or identity-bearing practice, fidelity itself may become meaningful.

The apparent lack of causal explanation is then no longer necessarily treated as a defect.

It can become evidence that the action belongs to a different category.

This is one place where the function of a rule may begin to shift.

A procedure that once produced an external result may later produce an internal social result:

If that happens, evidence that the original practical purpose is gone may no longer count as evidence that the rule is useless.

The rule may now be doing a different job.

5. Norms are not only copied; they can be enforced

Developmental work on children's reactions to rule violations was another important connection.

The research trail suggested that children can treat conventional rules normatively and protest when third parties violate them, even when the child is not personally harmed.

That is a qualitatively different process from imitation alone.

A copied behavior can disappear when individuals stop copying it.

A norm backed by correction and social enforcement can reproduce itself through the behavior of other people.

This creates a possible transition:

repeated behavior
→ expected behavior
→ correct behavior
→ enforced behavior

The boundary between these stages is unlikely to be clean, but the sequence is useful as a working model.

6. Some traditions may preserve useful knowledge that their practitioners cannot explain

The research on Fijian food taboos and related cultural-evolution examples raised another important possibility.

A community may preserve an adaptive practice even when individual members cannot explain the physical mechanism that makes it useful.

This is exactly the case in which "understand the reason before obeying" may fail as a learning strategy.

Some environmental relationships are difficult to infer from individual experience because:

In such environments, copying trusted practices can outperform individual causal reasoning.

This is one reason I am reluctant to treat inherited rules as evidence of stupidity.

A rule may be epistemically opaque to the person following it and still encode information that was expensive for the culture to acquire.

7. The same persistence problem appears in modern organizations

The organizational literature made the question much broader than ritual or traditional culture.

Merton's discussion of bureaucracy and goal displacement describes a familiar inversion: rules introduced as means to organizational goals can become goals in themselves.

Meyer and Rowan add another dimension.

Formal structures may serve legitimacy as well as technical efficiency. An organization may maintain procedures because those procedures demonstrate that it is a proper, rational, modern, compliant, or professional organization.

This means that a rule can persist even when it is weakly connected to day-to-day performance because it remains connected to legitimacy.

Again, the function has shifted.

What looks useless from one objective function may remain useful under another.

Working Interpretation

My current working interpretation is that "reason evaporation" is not one mechanism.

It is a family of transitions in which the relationship between a rule and its environment changes.

A simplified version looks like this:

environmental constraint
→ useful behavior
→ repeated behavior
→ inherited behavior
→ expected behavior
→ norm
→ identity / legitimacy signal
→ enforcement

This should not be read as a universal sequence.

Some rules may skip stages. Some may never become identity-bearing. Some may be created as symbolic or coercive rules from the beginning.

But the sequence helps explain an important puzzle:

A rule can lose its original reason without losing all of its functions.

This leads to a sharper formulation that I am currently considering:

instrumental rule
→ inherited rule
→ identity marker
→ loyalty signal

At the beginning, the rule is evaluated by whether it works.

Later, the same behavior may be evaluated by whether one follows it.

That is a change in objective function.

Once that change occurs, factual evidence about the original purpose may cease to function as an effective correction signal.

If a person says:

"This step no longer improves the outcome,"

the group may hear:

"You are refusing to do what people like us do."

The disagreement has moved from causality to membership.

At that point, trying to remove the rule by producing more evidence about efficiency may fail because efficiency is no longer the variable being defended.

A Distinction I Want to Preserve

There are at least three different statements that can easily be confused:

  1. The original reason for a rule is unknown.
  2. The original reason for a rule no longer exists.
  3. The rule currently serves no function.

These are not equivalent.

A rule whose reason is unknown may still be useful.

A rule whose original reason is gone may have acquired a new function.

A rule that has no useful function under one criterion may still function as a marker of identity, legitimacy, obedience, or belonging.

Therefore, "I cannot see the reason" is not enough to establish that a rule should be discarded.

But the reverse is also true.

The fact that inherited rules can preserve hidden knowledge is not a reason to immunize them from revision forever.

The unresolved problem is how to preserve the benefits of cultural inheritance without making inherited rules permanently immune to correction.

Connections I Was Considering

Inherited promises

This research connected strongly with the idea behind You Don't Have to Keep That Promise.

A promise may have been rational under the conditions in which it was made.

If those conditions disappear, the promise can remain psychologically binding because its function has shifted from protection to identity:

"This kept me safe"

can become

"This is what a good person does"

or

"Breaking this would mean betraying who I am."

This is structurally similar to rule persistence, even though interpersonal promises and social institutions should not be treated as identical mechanisms.

Cognitive compression

I was also considering a connection with the SANA concept of cognitive compression.

Under uncertainty or social threat, investigating causal structure may be more costly than accepting an available narrative or norm.

If conformity also protects belonging, then questioning a rule can carry two costs at once:

That could make rule revision especially difficult when group identity is involved.

This remains a hypothesis requiring more careful support.

The Correction Channel

A later connection is that persistent rules may become dangerous when they suppress the information required to revise them.

The central issue may not be simply whether a rule is wrong.

It may be whether evidence against the rule is allowed to survive as evidence.

If criticism is reclassified as disloyalty, disrespect, impurity, incompetence, or hostility, then the correction channel has been altered.

This suggests a broader question:

When does a rule stop being merely persistent and become resistant to the very signals that could reveal its obsolescence?

That may be more important than persistence alone.

Legitimacy

Institutional theory also connects this question to legitimacy.

A procedure may survive because removing it would create symbolic rupture even when its practical function is weak.

This suggests that effective reform may sometimes require translation rather than simple deletion.

A community may need a way to preserve continuity of meaning while changing the mechanism.

That idea appears elsewhere in my work, but I do not yet want to collapse these literatures into a single theory.

Uncertainties and Limits

Several parts of the exploratory research require caution.

1. The source set was heterogeneous

The research trail contained primary studies, academic summaries, repositories, secondary essays, popular explanations, and AI-assisted synthesis.

They should not be assigned equal evidentiary weight.

2. Some evolutionary claims were stated too strongly

Phrases such as "humans evolved this mechanism in order to..." can easily overstate what the evidence establishes.

At this stage I would prefer weaker formulations such as:

3. Overimitation should not be turned into a universal explanation

The existence of overimitation does not show that every persistent rule is caused by overimitation.

Nor does it mean that human cultural learning is simply "blind copying."

The phenomenon is one possible piece of a much larger system involving pedagogy, conformity, prestige, causal inference, norm psychology, incentives, and institutions.

4. Ritual and bureaucracy should not be treated as the same mechanism

I find the structural resemblance useful, but the underlying social and historical processes can differ substantially.

The comparison is currently heuristic.

5. Identity and loyalty signaling require more direct research

The transition from instrumental rule to identity marker to loyalty signal is one of the most interesting ideas emerging from this research, but it is not established by the exploratory document alone.

It needs direct comparison with research on:

6. "Reason evaporation" itself is a working label

I am using the phrase to identify a family of phenomena.

It should not yet be treated as a validated scientific construct.

7. Origin of the idea

I cannot reliably reconstruct a single origin for this line of thought.

The question existed in earlier work and returned through later conversations and research.

That uncertainty is part of the record.

What Could Change My View

I would revise this working model substantially if evidence showed that:

I would also change the model if a better existing framework already captures these transitions with greater precision.

Originality is not assumed here.

If an earlier theory already describes the same structure, that would clarify the intellectual genealogy rather than invalidate the question.

Later Updates

2026-09-06

At this stage, the most important shift in my thinking is that I no longer want to frame the phenomenon simply as:

"People keep following rules after the reason disappears."

The more useful question seems to be:

What function is the rule serving now?

A rule may survive not because people failed to notice that its original purpose disappeared, but because the rule migrated into another functional domain.

That migration may be the key transition to investigate.

The current working sequence is:

instrumental function
→ inherited convention
→ normative expectation
→ identity / legitimacy function
→ possible loyalty enforcement

The next research step is to test this sequence against primary literature rather than treating it as established.

Note on Provenance

This note records what I was thinking and investigating at a particular time.

It does not claim to reconstruct a single origin for the ideas recorded here.

Where the origin of a thought is uncertain, that uncertainty is intentional and should be preserved.

The underlying exploratory research used AI-assisted research and literature discovery. Claims should be rechecked against primary sources before being reused as formal evidence.