Rulebook Foundations Theory

The Pillars of the Rules of Sports

This post is a short supplement to Athletes Play Coordination Games – Coordination Part III.

It’s here in the Boneyard because this post is a little snarky and a little inside baseball. I’ll explain a bit more at the end, but this post will make more sense if you are working in the area of moral psychology or have read The Righteous Mind by Jon Haidt.

Ok. Here goes.

In Athletes Play Coordination Games, I discuss the fact that sports and games all have rules, and the list of rules, fouls, and punishments found in the sporting word is vast. These rules are about lines, time, equipment, and much else. To this point, there is no theory that explains all this variation—why some sports do it one way and others do it another. There is also no theory that explains the commonalities—why you see similar kinds of rules across all sports. In this post, I introduce Rulebook Foundations Theory, which attempts to do this explaining. It holds that fouls and penalties are a set of rules, specifications, and informal norms that, together, work to defend the measurement function of sports and deter harm to athletes.¹

To fill the need for a systematic theory of rulebook contents, I considered the wide range of sports that are played around the world. For example, many sports use clocks and many use lines to delineate boundaries.² After a survey of the worlds’ rulebooks,³ the following domains were identified:

1. Time-Related Violations: Covers false starts, delays of game, and other time-bound infractions.

2. Positional and Boundary Violations: This includes offside rules, stepping out of bounds, and specific area infractions such as crossing the crease in cricket or hockey.

3. Technical and Equipment Misuse: Technical rule infractions (like double dribbling in basketball or foot faults in tennis) and misuse of equipment (throwing a racket in tennis or bat misuse in baseball).

4. Player Composition: Includes fouls related to the number of players and substitution errors.

5. Physical Contact and Safety Violations: These are fouls to do with direct physical contact (like tackling in soccer or basketball) and safety-related fouls (such as helmet-to-helmet hits in football or high-sticking in hockey).

6. Behavioral and Sportsmanship Violations: Encompasses all forms of unsportsmanlike conduct, including verbal abuse, aggressive behavior, and any actions that go against the spirit of the game.

As you can see, Rulebook Foundations Theory captures the vast array of variation in penalties and rules and, in addition, adds an element I missed in the above discussion: sportsmanship. Penalties can also incentivize “nice” behavior.

Rulebook Foundations Theory is a major advance in understanding fouls and penalties.

But… is it?

What have we accomplished by organizing the vast array of rules of sports into bins or categories?

Here are different questions that you might try to answer.

I.      Why are there such things as rules, fouls, and penalties?

II.    Given that there are rules, fouls, and penalties, how might we go about organizing them?

It should be clear that the second question, about organizing rules, is different from and, really, downstream from the first one. It should similarly be clear that if you answer the second question, you might—but very well might not—have made progress answering the first one. 

In the post that accompanies this one, I propose that the coordination analysis answers the first question. These rules solve a coordination problem, and their function is to ensure the game’s ability to measure who is better and, in addition, deter harm. Understanding games as a coordination problem goes a long way to explaining why there are rules, how they function, what the remedy is for breaking them, and their contents.

In contrast, Rulebook Foundation Theory answers the second question. It’s important to note that you could have developed Rulebook Foundation Theory without any understanding, at all, about why there were rules in the first place. I asked ChatGPT to try to develop a classification system of fouls and penalties but did not supply it with my theory about coordination. By simply investigating the contents of rules, one could build a classification scheme without any deeper insight into what the rules were for in the first place. (Indeed, I understand Haidt and Joseph to endorse this sort of approach,⁴ advocating the sort of bottom up method I used here. For contrast, see Oliver Curry’s ideas.)

There are a ton of attractors when it comes to sports because there are a limited number of ways that you can structure competitions to measure who is better at sports. These involve time, structured space, equipment, and limits to action. The need to create a competition for athletic prowess leads naturally to similarities in rules across sports. Those facts explain why you get clusters 1 through 4. The need to deter harm explains cluster 5, and the desire to have nice behavior explains cluster 6.

Again, it’s crucial to bear in mind the distinction between the two questions above. The answer to the first question is to do with the function of rules in the first place, which is coordination. Coordination allows relative ability to be measured. The answer to the second is to do with attractors pulling equilibrium solutions for this coordination problem.

Similarly, Moral Foundations Theory organizes morality into, well, foundations. It answers the second question about morality: given that there are moral rules, how can we organize them? I see this as an exercise more to do with accounting than explaining. I will argue, in upcoming posts in the series on coordination, that morality is a coordination game in a way that mirrors the analysis of sports and games. I’ll show how a coordination analysis works the same for moral contents as it does for rules of sports. The remaining question will be to identify what game morality is coordinating.

REFERENCES

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 55-130). Academic Press.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 55-130). Academic Press.

Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. New York: Basic Books.

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98–116.

 Haidt, J., Graham, J., & Joseph, C. (2009). Above and below left-right: Ideological narratives and moral foundations. Psychological Inquiry, 20, 110–119.

Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus Fall, 133, 55–66.

Haidt J, Joseph C. (2007) The moral mind: How 5 sets of innate intuitions guide the development of many culture-specific virtues, and perhaps even modules. In: Carruthers P, Laurence S, Stich S, editors. The Innate Mind. Vol. 3. New York: Oxford, . pp. 367–391

Mauss M. The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge; 1924/1990. 

Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (2000). Disgust. In M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of Emotions (2nd ed., pp. 637-653). New York, NY: Guilford Press.Graham

Schelling, T. C. (1973). Hockey helmets, concealed weapons, and daylight saving: A study of binary choices with externalities. Journal of Conflict resolution, 17(3), 381-428. See also his book,

Schelling, T. C. (1978). Micromotives and Macrobehavior. Norton

Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), 35-57.

1. This is an important (and lengthy) footnote. Here is what I’m up to. I am borrowing the language and approach of Moral Foundations Theory to make a point. Moral Foundations Theory, developed by Jon Haidt and colleagues, posits that there are a limited set of moral foundations—e.g., harm, fairness, purity, etc.—that are the “building blocks” of morality. Different cultures and subgroups put different emphasis on different foundations. Here, I’m copying the style and some wording of the source material to illustrate how one might think about what Moral Foundations Theory is doing. This particular material in the text above is based on a key passage from Graham et al., 2012, which lays out key features of Moral Foundations Theory. Here is the original: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.”

2. This material is again analog of material from Graham et al. (2012). I have left in the citations to provide context for the ideas they were drawing from. Citations are at the end of this post. Here is the text I am imitating: “In order to fill the need for a systematic theory of morality, explaining its origins, development, and cultural variations, we created Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). Haidt and Joseph (2004) began by surveying the literatures in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, looking for matches – for virtues and areas of moral regulation that were common (though not necessarily universal) across cultures, and that had some clear counterpart in evolutionary thinking. For example, virtues related to fairness and practices of reciprocal gift exchange (e.g., Mauss, 1924/1990) bore an obvious similarity to the evolutionary literature on reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971); virtues of purity and practices regulating food and sex (e.g., Douglas, 1966) bore an obvious relationship to the evolutionary literature on disgust (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000).”

3. I did not, in fact, analyze the world’s rulebooks. I had a discussion with ChatGPT, which suggested categories. I modified the categories slightly. The idea about sportsmanship was not something I had considered. This ideas was ChatGPT’s, not mine.

4. They write, in part, “We reject on principle the idea that moral psychology should proceed in a principled (rather than descriptive, naturalistic) way…” (p. 2118). They favor a bottom-up (ad hoc) approach which, again, is fine, when one is addressing the second question.