Norm Learning, Teaching, and Change

Köster M., Hepach R.

AbstractSocial norms are foundational to human cooperation and co-existence in social groups. A crucial marker of social norms is that a behavior is not only shared, but that the conformity to the behavior of others is a basis for social evaluation (i.e., reinforcement and sanctioning), taking the is, how individuals usually behave, to an ought, how individuals should behave to be socially approved by others. In this preregistered study, we show that 11-month-old infants grasp this fundamental aspect about social norms already in their first year. They showed a pupillary surprise response for unexpected social responses, namely the disapproval and exclusion of an individual who showed the same behavior like others or the approval and inclusion of an individual who behaved differently. That preverbal infants link the conformity with others’ behavior to social evaluations, before they respond to norm violations themselves, indicates that the foundations of social norm understanding lie in early infancy.

Kuang J., Bicchieri C.

Previous studies have used various normative expressions such as ‘should’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘approved’ interchangeably to communicate injunctions and social norms. However, little is known about whether people's interpretations of normative language differ and whether behavioural responses might vary across them. In two studies (total n = 2903), we find that compliance is sensitive to the types of normative expressions and how they are used. Specifically, people are more likely to comply when the message is framed as an injunction rather than as what most people consider good behaviour (social norm framing). Behaviour is influenced by the type of normative expression when the norm is weak (donation to charities), not so when the norm is strong (reciprocity). Content analysis of free responses reveals individual differences in the interpretation of social norm messages, and heterogeneous motives for compliance. Messages in the social norm framing condition are perceived to be vague and uninformative, undermining their effectiveness. These results suggest that careful choice of normative expressions is in order when using messages to elicit compliance, especially when the underlying norms are weak. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.

Molho C., De Petrillo F., Garfield Z.H., Slewe S.

Across human societies, people are sometimes willing to punish norm violators. Such punishment can take the form of revenge from victims, seemingly altruistic intervention from third parties, or legitimized sanctioning from institutional representatives. Although prior work has documented cross-cultural regularities in norm enforcement, substantial variation exists in the prevalence and forms of punishment across societies. Such cross-societal variation may arise from universal psychological mechanisms responding to different socio-ecological conditions, or from cultural evolutionary processes, resulting in different norm enforcement systems. To date, empirical evidence from comparative studies across diverse societies has remained disconnected, owing to a lack of interdisciplinary integration and a prevalent tendency of empirical studies to focus on different underpinnings of variation in norm enforcement. To provide a more complete view of the shared and unique aspects of punishment across societies, we review prior research in anthropology, economics and psychology, and take a first step towards integrating the plethora of socio-ecological and cultural factors proposed to explain cross-societal variation in norm enforcement. We conclude by discussing how future cross-societal research can use diverse methodologies to illuminate key questions on the domain-specificity of punishment, the diversity of tactics supporting social norms, and their role in processes of norm change. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.

Gelfand M.J., Gavrilets S., Nunn N.

Social norms are the glue that hold society together, yet our knowledge of them remains heavily intellectually siloed. This article provides an interdisciplinary review of the emerging field of norm dynamics by integrating research across the social sciences through a cultural-evolutionary lens. After reviewing key distinctions in theory and method, we discuss research on norm psychology—the neural and cognitive underpinnings of social norm learning and acquisition. We then overview how norms emerge and spread through intergenerational transmission, social networks, and group-level ecological and historical factors. Next, we discuss multilevel factors that lead norms to persist, change, or erode over time. We also consider cultural mismatches that can arise when a changing environment leads once-beneficial norms to become maladaptive. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions and the implications of norm dynamics for theory and policy. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 75 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Heyes C.

Norms permeate human life. Most of people’s activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden—rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of “norm psychology” and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior—compliance, enforcement, and commentary—and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or “cognitive gadget,” perspective suggests that people alive today—parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers—have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People’s actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Partington S., Nichols S., Kushnir T.

Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded by mere group membership. However, another possibility is rational learning: given the available evidence, people infer the social scope of norms in statistically appropriate ways. With this paper, we introduce a rational learning account of parochial norm acquisition and test a unique prediction that it makes. In one study with adults (N = 480) and one study with children ages 5- to 8-years-old (N = 120), participants viewed violations of a novel rule sampled from one of two unfamiliar social groups. We found that adults judgments of social scope - whether the rule applied only to the sampled group (parochial scope), or other groups (inclusive scope) - were appropriately sensitive to the relevant features of their statistical evidence (Study 1). In children (Study 2) we found an age difference: 7- to 8-year-olds used statistical evidence to infer that norms were parochial or inclusive, whereas 5- to 6-year olds were overall inclusive regardless of statistical evidence. A Bayesian analysis shows a possible inclusivity bias: adults and children inferred inclusive rules more frequently than predicted by a naïve Bayesian model with unbiased priors. This work highlights that tribalist biases in social cognition are not necessary to explain the acquisition of parochial norms.

Dorigoni A., Bonini N.

The impact of humanity's behavior on the ecological environment is a hot topic that has been widely studied over the past few years. The consumption of plastic bottled water has steadily increased, even in countries where the quality of tap water is considered excellent. This poses a problem for the environment for multiple reasons, for example: emissions due to transportation and non-biodegradable plastic waste. This paper addresses the issue of how policy-makers implement interventions aimed at increasing the consumption of tap water instead of bottled water. Specifically, it investigates how the use of a descriptive social norm in a restaurant might reduce the plastic bottled water consumption. Results show that the presence of the message “TWO IN THREE PEOPLE FROM THIS AREA DRINK TAP WATER” induced a significant impact on behavior because it decreased plastic bottled water sales by 12 percentage points, from 96% to 84%, considering only the 4055 water requests, bottled or tap, and not the overall number of drink orders. Behavioral public policy is discussed to discourage bottled water consumption.

Woo B.M., Tan E., Hamlin J.K.

Scholars from across the social sciences, biological sciences, and humanities have long emphasized the role of human morality in supporting cooperation. How does morality arise in human development? One possibility is that morality is acquired through years of socialization and active learning. Alternatively, morality is instead based on a “moral core”: primitive abilities that emerge in infancy to make sense of morally relevant behaviors. Here, we review evidence that infants and toddlers understand a variety of morally relevant behaviors and readily evaluate agents who engage in them. These abilities appear to be rooted in the goals and intentions driving agents’ morally relevant behaviors and are sensitive to group membership. This evidence is consistent with a moral core, which may support later social and moral development and ultimately be leveraged for human cooperation. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 4 is December 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Schaumberg R.L., Skowronek S.E.

How does shame affect social cohesion? Prior work has drawn divergent conclusions to this question because shame can spur maladaptive behaviors for people who experience it. However, past work has overlooked the interindividual effects of shame—how one’s expression of shame affects people who witness it. We investigated these social-learning effects of shame and identified norm transmission as a reliable route by which shame facilitates social cohesion. Across five studies and two supplemental studies with U.S.-based adult participants ( N = 3,726), we manipulated whether someone conveys shame, no specific emotion, or other discrete emotions regarding their behavior. We then assessed the effect of this emotional expression on participants’ norm inferences and norm-conforming behavior. We found that shame broadcasts particularly strong signals about social norms, and people adjust their behavior to align with these norms. We discuss how these findings challenge common conclusions about shame and generate insights about shame’s influence on social life.

McBride M., Ridinger G.

A growing body of research reveals that various pro-social behaviors result from a desire to follow social norms. Indeed, a recent study by Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2016) introduced the Rule-following (RF) Task and finds that an individual’s willingness to follow rules in the RF Task predicts her pro-social behavior across many experimental settings. We conduct four experimental studies that use the RF Task. We find that an individual’s willingness to follow rules depends on her belief about others’ rule following and not just an individual-level fixed trait for norm compliance. We discuss the implications of our results for our larger understanding of human pro-sociality.

Gweon H.

Social learning is often portrayed as a passive process of copying and trusting others. This view, however, does not fully capture what makes human social learning so powerful: social information is often ‘curated' by helpful teachers. I argue that both learning from others (social learning) and helping others learn (teaching) can be characterized as probabilistic inferences guided by an intuitive understanding of how people think, plan, and act. Consistent with this idea, even young children draw rich inferences from evidence provided by others and generate informative evidence that helps others learn. By studying social learning and teaching through a common theoretical lens, inferential social learning provides an integrated account of how human cognition supports acquisition and communication of abstract knowledge.

Pinho A.D., Molleman L., Braams B.R., van den Bos W.

Personal norms consist of individuals’ attitudes about the appropriateness of behaviour. These norms guide adolescents’ behaviour in countless domains that are fundamental for their social functioning and well-being. Peers are known to have a marked influence on adolescent risk-taking and prosocial behaviour, but little is known about how peers shape personal norms underlying those behaviours. Here we show that adolescents’ personal norms are decisively moulded by the norms of the majority and popular peers in their social network. Our experiment indicates that observing peer norms substantially impacts adolescents’ normative evaluation of risk-taking and prosocial behaviours. The majority norm had a stronger impact than the norm of a single popular peer, and norm adjustments were largest when adolescents observed strong disapproval of risk-taking or strong approval of prosocial behaviour. Our study suggests that learning about peer norms likely promotes adolescents to hold views and values supporting socially desirable behaviour.

Hertz U.

Changes to social settings caused by migration, cultural change or pandemics force us to adapt to new social norms. Social norms provide groups of individuals with behavioural prescriptions and therefore can be inferred by observing their behaviour. This work aims to examine how cognitive learning processes affect adaptation and learning of new social norms. Using a multiplayer game, I found that participants initially complied with various social norms exhibited by the behaviour of bot-players. After gaining experience with one norm, adaptation to a new norm was observed in all cases but one, where an active-harm norm was resistant to adaptation. Using computational learning models, I found that active behaviours were learned faster than omissions, and harmful behaviours were more readily attributed to all group members than beneficial behaviours. These results provide a cognitive foundation for learning and adaptation to descriptive norms and can inform future investigations of group-level learning and cross-cultural adaptation.

Watson-Jones R.E., Wen N.J., Legare C.H.

Abstract ritual is a universal feature of human culture. A decade of psychological research provides new insight into the early emerging propensity for ritual learning. Children learn the ritual practices and instrumental skills of their communities by observing and imitating trusted group members such as adults and peers. They use social and contextual cues to determine when an action is an instrumental skill versus a ritual, and they modify their behavior accordingly. When behavior is interpreted as a ritual, children imitate with higher fidelity, engage in less innovation, are more accurate when detecting differences, and display more functional fixedness than when behavior is interpreted as instrumental. Children and adults also transmit ritual behavior to others with higher fidelity than they do instrumental behavior. The authors propose that affiliation with social groups motivates imitative fidelity of ritual. Species-specific social learning mechanisms facilitate the transmission of instrumental skills as well as rituals intergenerationally and enable cumulative cultural learning.

Eriksson K., Strimling P., Gelfand M., Wu J., Abernathy J., Akotia C.S., Aldashev A., Andersson P.A., Andrighetto G., Anum A., Arikan G., Aycan Z., Bagherian F., Barrera D., Basnight-Brown D., et. al.

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. Little is known about people’s preferred responses to norm violations across countries. Here, in a study of 57 countries, the authors highlight cultural similarities and differences in people’s perception of the appropriateness of norm violations.