Road sharing - does it matter what road users think of each other?

Where do moral models come from?19protocols emerge without anyone setting out to create or promote them. Thephenomenon is ubiquitous across human behaviour, with language, culture andfashion being some of the more obvious examples.It is in this context that we can talk about norms. Through the mechanismsabove, norms link what is normal (what most people do) to what is normative(what people should do). This is why we can explain synchronised sidesteppingin two apparently different ways. Caught in the situation, I knowneither what the other person will do (what is normal) nor what I should do(what is normative): there is no norm.A useful concept here is that of a dynamic equilibrium: a persistent state of asystem in which the individual parts are constantly in flux. The innumerablecomplex interactions that occur on the roads every day occur in such a state ofdynamic equilibrium, which the norms of the road describe. Such equilibria canarise without the need for any intervention by an ‘authority’, after which theymay persist, change steadily, or suddenly collapse in response to apparentlysmall changes within them.It is plausible, if unproven, that the spontaneous emergence and maintenanceof norms lies behind much of the consistent behaviour we see in humans. It isequally plausible that the same processes are at work on the roads.Emergence and moral modelsHow does this relate to moral models?Norms do not have to require all people involved to do the same thing, as wasthe case in the example of driving on the left. A simple example of a norm(or set of norms) which does not is ‘giving way’, which works preciselybecause the two people involved do different things. Many norms have roles,and so long as each party makes the same allocation of all the other playersto those roles (aided, for instance, by white lines on the road), then the normserves as the shared protocol necessary to make the interaction work.