Maladaptive social norms, cultural progress, and the free-energy principle.

Veissière and collaborators ground their account of culture and social norms in the free-energy principle, which postulates that the utility (or adaptive value) of an outcome is equivalent to its probability. This equivalence would mean that their account entails that complying with social norms has always adaptive value. But, this is false, because many social norms are obviously maladaptive.