Informal lax rules displace formal rules inside destructive hierarchies

Evidence

In these organizations, coercive pressures are high. One “obeys orders,” and often one’s own life is in danger. Those to be controlled are the enemy and are often dehumanized. Criminals are called “scum”; Vietnamese are called “gooks.” What one can do to the enemy or who counts as the enemy is rigidly rule-bound, but the reader will be well aware of the pressures to bend those rules and replace formal rules with informal rules that prescribe different and more lax standards. These informal rules come to govern behavior, and are well understood at the level of the police officer on the beat or the soldier in the field. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3989

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Kelman and Hamilton’s classic work on sanctioned massacres and to the dehumanization discussed in earlier chapters of this very book. — connects to: Institutions are fluid arrangements that blur any formal-informal binary. — Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth, Institutional Bricolage and Commoning…, 18; Platform rules chain down a hierarchy of technical gatekeepers — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 233; Rule proliferation paradoxically expands rather than constrains frontline discretion — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 145