1. Sport and game rules

Sport and game rules are widely deemed typical examples of arbitrary conventions (Schmidt & Tomasello, Reference Schmidt and Tomasello2012). The authors similarly argue that competitive sports (e.g., football), despite being oriented toward some instrumental outcomes (e.g., playing a ball into the opposing teams' net), are constrained by slavishly copied, causally opaque conventions (e.g., the prohibition to use one's hands to do so). We argue, however, that people adopt an instrumental stance toward these conventional rules themselves, designing and selectively retaining them to satisfy the goals they pursue by playing or watching sports and games – such as being entertained and signaling one's skills (Lombardo, Reference Lombardo2012; see Dubourg & Baumard [Reference Dubourg and Baumard2022] for another example of entertainment technology).

This is manifested by the fact that sport and game rules are transformed, under people's impulse, in a direction that increasingly satisfies those goals. Sport federations have adapted their rules throughout history to maximize players' and spectators' enjoyment, and the possibility for players' to signal their physical skills. The “offside rule,” for instance, has been explicitly designed and retained because it prevents players from “goal-hanging,” thereby making the game harder to play and funnier to watch (Zhao, Reference Zhao2021; see Fig. 1 for other examples). Even at a more micro-level, non-professionals who play street football spontaneously adapt the official rules of football to the context (e.g., the pitch dimensions). For instance, they commonly remove goalkeepers and reduce the number of players, to make the game funnier and more physically challenging (Hill-Haas, Dawson, Impellizzeri, & Coutts, Reference Hill-Haas, Dawson, Impellizzeri and Coutts2011). In other words, we doubt that people would slavishly copy rules that would make a sport boring and hard to use to signal or train their physical skills. Taking back the authors' example, we propose that people who (copy people who) use their feet and not their hands, do it because it makes the game funnier and allows better display of gross motor skills.

Figure 1

Instrumental effects justifying rules modified by the international football federation (from You, Reference You2017).

2. Social etiquette

As the authors note, rules of etiquette also appear as purely arbitrary conventions, compliance to which is motivated solely by a “need to belong.” Yet closer examination again suggests that their cultural design and preservation also obeys non-arbitrary, instrumental criteria. In a famous study, Nichols (Reference Nichols2002) showed that, of the table manners promoted in etiquette manuals of the European Renaissance (see Elias, Reference Elias1939), those that prohibited behaviors eliciting disgust (e.g., spitting) were more likely to have been culturally preserved to the point of being still part of contemporary social etiquette. Rules that didn't elicit disgust, by contrast, were more likely to go culturally extinct, presumably precisely because they appeared to people as more arbitrary (Nichols, Reference Nichols2002). If social etiquette was culturally preserved because of slavish, affiliative copying, etiquette rules should have been preserved whatever their content. Rather, what seems to have happened is that, despite their apparent arbitrariness, etiquette rules have stabilized because people perceive them (not necessarily consciously) as satisfying some intuitive goal, such as not imposing on others the unpleasant experience of being disgusted while eating (Baumard, Reference Baumard2016; Royzman, Leeman, & Baron, Reference Royzman, Leeman and Baron2009).

3. Supernatural rituals

The authors also argue that magico-religious rituals, despite being oriented toward some instrumental goal (i.e., warding off misfortune), are socially learned through the ritual stance because of their “causal irresolvability.” Yet a growing body of research suggests that the social learning of such cultural traits is mostly driven by instrumental inference. For example, Hong and Henrich (Reference Hong and Henrich2021) present abundant historical and ethnographic evidence that people adopt (or not) divination practices primarily based on their evaluation of whether the latter “works” (or not) for revealing accurate information. People, moreover, “carefully discriminate among diviners according to perceived skill, ability, or success … in pretty much the same way as [they do for] any other artisans whose abilities can be evaluated by other community members” (Hong & Henrich, Reference Hong and Henrich2021, pp. 625–626). Hong, Slingerland, and Henrich (Reference Hong, Slingerland and Henrich2022) similarly review historical evidence that, despite the apparent “exoticity” of rain-making rituals to modern people, early Chinese mostly adopted a “problem-solving,” instrumental mindset toward rain-making methods, willingly abandoning – rather than slavishly copying – methods that seemed ineffective in making rain fall (see also Boyer, Reference Boyer2020; Fitouchi & Singh, Reference Fitouchi and Singh2022; Singh, Reference Singh2021, Reference Singh2018; for other examples).