“The Situation Sounds Sketchy”: Institutional Rule-Breaking and a Qualitative Case for Quantifying Culture

Abstract

As respondents assess the cultural normalcy of social events, they employ both affective and cognitive criteria. Does this event feel normal? Does this event make sense? While these related questions often have the same answer, we know little about the assessment process under circumstances of signal mismatch. Using qualitative and quantitative data from two experimental studies, this research separately evaluates the effects of deflection level (is this event affectively normative) and institutional concordance (do the components of this event obey the guiding parameters of social institutions) in the assessment of social events. Online-administered surveys gathered data for a 3-condition experiment in an undergraduate sample ( N = 74) and a 4-condition experiment in a non-undergraduate quasi-nationally representative sample ( N = 507). Results from linear mixed models and ANOVAs show that (1) both concordance and low deflection are significant predictors of event assessment ratings, (2) when controlling for concordance, event deflection level remains a statistically significant predictor, and (3) deflection and concordance have a significant and positive interaction effect. Qualitative data patterns and a visualization of predicted probabilities from a multinomial logit model further suggest that (4) cognitive work in respondents’ assessments—transforming high-deflection events into low-deflection events through contextualized reinterpretations in accord with institutional domain parameters—follow affect control theory principles. This research strengthens understanding of and predictive abilities concerning social responses to culturally contextualized events.