Abstract
Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.
Highlights
Norms, in the sense of collective ideas about approved and disapproved behavior, exert a powerful influence on how people behave[1]
Hypothesis 1: The more appropriate a triggering behavior is perceived to be, the more appropriate it is to respond by doing nothing and the less appropriate it is to respond by using confrontation, social ostracism, or gossip, and this will be consistent across countries
This held for verbal confrontation, M = −0.77, 95% CI [−0.80, −0.75], gossip, M = −0.67 [−0.71, −0.62], and social ostracism, M = −0.39 [−0.44, −0.34]
Summary
In the sense of collective ideas about approved and disapproved behavior, exert a powerful influence on how people behave[1]. This characterization is unlikely to provide a realistic account of how people deal with norm violators in everyday life To capture this realism, scholars[10,11] have recently proposed three distinct informal sanctions: social ostracism (e.g., individuals or groups actively avoiding someone), gossip (e.g., spreading information about someone’s inappropriate behavior), and direct confrontation (e.g., verbal or physical). For each of the 10 scenarios, participants rated the appropriateness of the described behavior as well as the appropriateness of four different responses to it: verbal confrontation (making an angry remark to the norm violator), gossip (talking to someone else about the norm violator), social ostracism (making a point of avoiding the norm violator in the future), and non-action (doing nothing), for a total of 10 × 5 = 50 ratings. The four following hypotheses concern the country variation in the perceived appropriateness of informal sanctions: its consistency across different norm violation domains, its specificity across different forms of sanctions, its relation to variation in the use of informal sanctions, and its relation to variation in other cultural and societal factors
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