Social norm compliance as a signaling system. I. Studies of fitness-related attributions consequent on everyday norm violations

Abstract

People attend to cues that convey information about social norms and try to comply with norms they believe are in force. Dispositions to comply with social norms are universal, suggesting that adherence to such norms is selectively advantageous. Possibly, compliance with social norms, however arbitrary these may be, serves a signaling function and is used to control attributions affecting fitness. To begin to test this hypothesis, we performed several experiments in which subjects watched videotapes of models violating everyday social norms and then rated those models on dimensions that would be relevant to the models' fitness, if subjects and models were socially interacting. In some experiments, violations of minor social norms significantly altered such ratings. Even subjects who failed to cite norm violations when given the opportunity nonetheless gave lower ratings to models as the result of norm violations. A manipulation that increased the salience of such norms increased the adverse effects of norms violations. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that norm compliance serves an important signaling function.