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Participant inferences of the prescriptive norm as a function of outlier extremity. The dotted lines represent the average extremity if one averages both days: (34 min later 3 min later)/2 18.5; (14 min later 3 min later)/2 8.5. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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Social outliers draw a lot of attention from those inside and outside their group and yet little is known about their impact on perceptions of their group as a whole. The present studies examine how outliers influence observers’ summary perceptions of a group’s behavior and inferences about the group’s descriptive and prescriptive norms. Across 4 s...
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... the group norm as more extreme than participants who viewed only the extreme outlier on Day 1. Why might viewing a normal group, in which the outlier has regressed to the mean, cause individuals to perceive a later arrival time as more acceptable? Perhaps individuals view the Day 2 arrival time of the Day 1 outlier through the lens of her earlier behavior. On Day 2, the same actor associated with the extreme arrival on Day 1 arrives at 8:18 a.m. Though the target's Day 2 time is not particularly extreme-it would likely raise little notice had it occurred on Day 1-it may seem more extreme or noticeable in light of the target's extremely late arrival on Day 1. After only Day 1, participants may view the extreme behavior as unreliable, as shown in free responses in Study 3, but on Day 2, the outlier is still the last to arrive, perhaps signaling that the extreme behavior from Day 1 is a more reliable signal of the norm. If this is true, we speculate that an extreme outlier, partially regressed to the group mean, may be treated by an observer as more of a moderate outlier. To explore this possibility, in Figure 5, we graph the results again, but this time, for conditions in which 2 days of arrivals are observed, we average the extremity of the outlier on Day 1 and Day 2. Participant judgments of the prescriptive norm suggest that they may average the distributions across time in forming their perception of the group. This suggests that first impressions hold sway but will eventually regress to the mean if behavior stabilizes for long ...
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... This latter distribution was heavily skewed, and participants underestimated the frequency of non-use. Several theoretical approaches seem to be able to account for inaccurate estimates for skewed distributions-for instance, a bias towards normality for observers outside the standard range [15], social sample theory [17], and effects of moderately sized salient outliers [18,19]. Even representation or availability heuristics [20] would predict misestimation of skewed distributions if items at the tail end of the distribution were more salient than other elements. ...
... For instance, Nisbett and Kunda [15] reported a bias toward estimating symmetric (or normal) distributions. Dannals and Miller [19] account for this bias by noting the difficulty people have in understanding the effects of outliers and attributed this to a form of representation error [5,52]. In Dannals and Miller's proposal, when people are estimating a distribution, exemplars of men or women who desire a larger number of partners are perceptually more salient and therefore stand out and lead to a skew in estimation that is much larger than in the data. ...
Misperceptions of the social world can lead to actions and social policy that are detrimental to an individual’s or group’s well-being. Here we investigate whether misperceptions arise when participants make predictions of the modal number of ideal future sexual partners reported by heterosexual cohorts (younger cohort: 18–23 years; older cohort: 24–29 years). For both men and women and in both cohorts, the modal number of reported partners equaled 1.0, but men’s averages were higher than women’s averages due to a subgroup of men who reported desiring large numbers of partners (that is, the distributions had the same shape, but men’s distributions had a longer tail). Study 1: When asked to estimate the mode directly, participants performed poorly and, in some conditions, dramatically so (e.g., 40% of younger men reported wanting one sexual partner, but 0% of younger men predicted 1 to be the most frequent response). Study 2: When asked to estimate the shape of the whole distribution, participants underestimated the number of respondents who would desire the mode and thus replicated patterns in the literature for misestimations of skewed distributions. Study 3: When provided information about others’ actual modal desired number of partners, the number of male participants who reported desiring one sexual partner increased, suggesting that misperceptions of social norms may influence preferences. We discuss how the mean and mode can lead to two accurate but different interpretations of the data (mean: men report desiring more sexual partners than women; mode: the most frequent response reported by both men and women is 1.0). Discrepancies of this sort can lead to mischaracterizations that may not be uncommon in the research literature. These discrepancies cannot be differentiated by significance tests that seek to find differences in the mean but can be resolved with attention to other methods of analyses.
... [28][29][30][31][32] A lack of cues about health-promotive behavior, a focus on some (extreme) cues over other (e.g., less attention grabbing) cues, being in a group or network with outlier behavior, and various psychological attribution and conversation processes can lead to norm perception bias. 27,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39] These misperceptions matter because people act in line with their perceptions regardless of perception accuracy. A large body of work on perceived norms has shown evidence of both pervasive misperceived norms and strong links between misperceived norms and personal behavior across several fields and topics. ...
Access to water safe for consumption is critical for health and well-being, yet substantial structural barriers often necessitate household action to make water safer. Social norms about water treatment practices are understudied as a driver of personal water treatment practice. This study assesses reported and perceived water treatment practices among women in a rural, water insecure setting. We used cross-sectional data from a population-based study of women living with children under 5 years old across eight villages in southwest Uganda. Participants reported their typical household water treatment practices and what they perceived to be the common practices among most other women with young children in their own village. Modified multivariable Poisson regression models estimated the association between individual behavior and perceptions. Of 274 participants (78% response rate), 221 (81%) reported boiling water and 228 (83%) reported taking at least one action to make water safer. However, 135 (49%) misperceived most women with young children in their village not to boil their water, and 119 (43%) misperceived most to take no action. Participants who misperceived these norms were less likely to practice safe water treatment (e.g., for boiling water, adjusted relative risk = 0.80; 95% CI 0.69–0.92, P = 0.002), adjusting for other factors. Future research should assess whether making actual descriptive norms about local water treatment practices visible and salient (e.g., with messages such as “most women in this village boil their drinking water”) corrects misperceived norms and increases safe water treatment practices by some and supports consistent safe practices by others.
... Through repetition (Prentice and Paluck, 2020), social enforcement (Schultz et al., 2007), and internal feedback (Schwartz and Howard, 1981), new norms may develop and existing ones may change. So far, processes of norm change unfolding over time are little understood (Anderson and Dunning, 2014;Dannals and Miller, 2017;van Kleef et al., 2019;Dannals et al., 2022). ...
Psychological research on norms has shown that norms are highly relevant for individuals’ decision-making. Yet, there is so far little understanding of how norms change over time. Knowledge about how norms change may help better understanding their potential for as well as limitations in guiding decision-making and changing behavior. The present work investigated change in individuals’ cooperation norms. As an indicator of different underlying processes of norm change, the temporal dynamics of different types of norms were examined. It was assumed that participants’ social norms are adapted quickly whenever the social situation changes, while personal norms change more slowly and gradually, abstracting part of the situational learning in interaction with one’s personality. In an experimental study, participants played a repeated prisoner’s dilemma game with artificial co-players representing a predominantly cooperative or uncooperative social setting, depending on the experimental condition. The condition was expected to affect slow learning of personal norms. Additionally, the cooperativeness of the social setting was varied repeatedly within conditions, expected to result in fast changes in social norms. Participants’ personal and social norms were assessed throughout the game. As predicted, the temporal dynamics differed between norms with social norms changing quickly and personal norms more slowly. Personal norms strongly predicted behavioral decision-making and were predicted by situational and personality factors. Potential qualitative differences of the underlying norm change processes are discussed.
... New norms can emerge in younger generations, driven by a desire for a distinct social identity or competition for resources with older generations [39][40][41][42][43][44]. Changes in norms can also be triggered by fresh information about costs, benefits or others' behaviours and beliefs, and by alignment with authoritative or influential individuals. ...
We review theoretical approaches for modelling the origin, persistence and change of social norms. The most comprehensive models describe the coevolution of behaviours, personal, descriptive and injunctive norms while considering influences of various authorities and accounting for cognitive processes and between-individual differences. Models show that social norms can improve individual and group well-being. Under some conditions though, deleterious norms can persist in the population through conformity, preference falsification and pluralistic ignorance. Polarization in behaviour and beliefs can be maintained, even when societal advantages of particular behaviours or belief systems over alternatives are clear. Attempts to change social norms can backfire through cognitive processes including cognitive dissonance and psychological reactance. Under some conditions social norms can change rapidly via tipping point dynamics. Norms can be highly susceptible to manipulation, and network structure influences their propagation. Future models should incorporate network structure more thoroughly, explicitly study online norms, consider cultural variations and be applied to real-world processes.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.
... Rules and regulations, such as COVID-19 safety restrictions, are often seen as the formal representation of a social norm, communicating not only what is considered morally right or wrong but also what is probably done by most people (Cooter, 1998;Feldman, 2009;McAdams, 2000;Mulder, 2008;Sommers & Burke, 2021). However, even if only one person is violating a rule, this may inadvertently signal that the rule is generally not adhered to or approved of by others because people typically give outsized importance to deviant behaviour when developing norm perceptions for an entire group (Dannals & Miller, 2017). As such, rule breakers have the potential to undermine perceived norms and others' adherence to norms, as antisocial behaviour spreads easily and rapidly throughout social networks (Dimant, 2019;Jewell et al., 2014;Schaefers et al., 2015), especially via close social ties (Centola, 2010). ...
Observing deviant behaviour can lead to ‘norm erosion’, where a norm is no longer seen as relevant and compliance with it is reduced. Previous research argues that social confrontations can mitigate norm erosion. However, this work has not considered the impact of bystanders to confrontations, who might influence the outcome by supporting—or failing to support—the person confronting a social rule breaker. We examine the effect of bystanders' reactions on preventing norm erosion across three experimental studies. We examined how supportive and non‐supportive bystander reactions to a confronter impacted the perceived strength of a prosocial norm among participants and their behavioural intentions. We find that when bystanders explicitly supported the confronter against the rule breaker, the norm was perceived as stronger—and sometimes, compliance intentions were higher—than when bystanders did not respond to the confronter. A mini meta‐analysis across the three studies reveals that the effect of bystander support on perceived norm strength is large and robust. Our work demonstrates that for the prevention of norm erosion, confrontations benefit greatly from being explicitly supported by bystanders.
... More recent, interdisciplinary work focuses on understanding social norms and societal change that begins with norm deviance. Much of this work seeks to test which types of people, or which corners of a social network, are most influential over the rest of the community when they deviate from an established behavioral norm (e.g., Paluck et al., 2016;Dannals and Miller, 2017;Guilbeault and Centola, 2021). This type of research seeks to study deviance at scale-who can shift communities and societies? ...
... While investigators have turned to study the influence effects of social deviance, or how one person's deviance can influence others Paluck et al., 2016;Dannals and Miller, 2017), the recent renewed focus on deviance has not included a focus on how individuals personally experience and are affected by their own deviation from a norm. Early work that focused on compliance with norms showed that when people anticipate breaking a norm they do so with a certain amount of dread, and they offer explanations to rationalize why their behavior isn't so deviant (e.g., Milgram and Sabini, 1978). ...
... Early work that focused on compliance with norms showed that when people anticipate breaking a norm they do so with a certain amount of dread, and they offer explanations to rationalize why their behavior isn't so deviant (e.g., Milgram and Sabini, 1978). However, because most studies focused on reactions from community members (e.g., Monin et al., 2008;, or recently, on the behavior of elite influencers who are thought to have particular sway over norm perceptions Paluck and Shepherd, 2012;Dannals and Miller, 2017), psychologists have less data to speak to the experience of deviance among ordinary people. We distinguish such "ordinary people" from the people identified by research as social norm entrepreneurs (Gomila et al., 2023), social referents (Paluck and Shepherd, 2012), or individuals who are less identified with mainstream norms (Dannals and Miller, 2017). ...
How are ordinary people affected by the experience of stepping out against conventions that are central to their community? We conducted a field experiment in New York City to study Satmar Hasidic women's personal reactions to deviating from their community's high-end clothing norm by wearing an inexpensive plain dress (treatment) vs. carrying a prayer book (normative placebo) for one day. We find that women's experience of deviation from their community norm of high-end dressing was strongly uncomfortable, but was not internalized as new attitudes or self-perceptions. Instead, we find that the experience with deviance mostly affected women's perceptions of their community, in terms of their closeness to the community and to some of its central tenets, and the community norm of high end dressing. In this setting, the experience of individual deviation seems to change perceptions of the context—its norms and our relationship to our community—over perceptions of the self and of deviant action. The results of this study help to map out a theory of community and social change that accounts for individuals' anticipation of deviance and social experiences alone, together, and over time that affect their decisions about whether to participate in change.
... Numerous studies in social psychology have demonstrated that an individual changes her behaviour under social influence (Dannals & Miller, 2017;Ng et al., 2021;Yamin et al., 2019). One important mechanism of this effect is referred to as 'normative influence', meaning that people tend to align their behaviour according to the descriptive norm of their social groups, that is, what most of the people in a group do (Christensen et al., 2004;Lapinski & Rimal, 2005;Spears, 2021). ...
Online learning platforms increase opportunities for learners to participate in learning out of interest, without any external incentives such as fulfilling requirements for degree programmes or certificates. However, such forms of online learning often suffer from low sustained learning engagement. Building on theories related to normative influences, this study extends the literature by focusing on the effect of peer information on learning engagement and outcomes in an online learning setting without external incentives. A field experiment was conducted through a leading massive open online course platform in China, and information interventions were manipulated in social media groups associated with the course. Surprisingly, the results revealed that the presence of peers' active learning behaviour information did not always lead to enhanced learning engagement. Specifically, it had a positive influence only when question intervention was applied, that is, when the learners were also presented with questions related to the course content prior to learning. Moreover, question intervention alone was effective in enhancing learning engagement. Our results also showed that the learners with question interventions were more likely to pay attention to their peers' behaviour and align their learning pace with that of their peers. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
... More recent, interdisciplinary work focuses on understanding social norms and societal change that begins with norm deviance. Much of this work seeks to test which types of people, or which corners of a social network, are most influential over the rest of the community when they deviate from an established behavioral norm (e.g., Paluck et al., 2016;Dannals and Miller, 2017;Guilbeault and Centola, 2021). This type of research seeks to study deviance at scale-who can shift communities and societies? ...
... While investigators have turned to study the influence effects of social deviance, or how one person's deviance can influence others Paluck et al., 2016;Dannals and Miller, 2017), the recent renewed focus on deviance has not included a focus on how individuals personally experience and are affected by their own deviation from a norm. Early work that focused on compliance with norms showed that when people anticipate breaking a norm they do so with a certain amount of dread, and they offer explanations to rationalize why their behavior isn't so deviant (e.g., Milgram and Sabini, 1978). ...
... Early work that focused on compliance with norms showed that when people anticipate breaking a norm they do so with a certain amount of dread, and they offer explanations to rationalize why their behavior isn't so deviant (e.g., Milgram and Sabini, 1978). However, because most studies focused on reactions from community members (e.g., Monin et al., 2008;, or recently, on the behavior of elite influencers who are thought to have particular sway over norm perceptions Paluck and Shepherd, 2012;Dannals and Miller, 2017), psychologists have less data to speak to the experience of deviance among ordinary people. We distinguish such "ordinary people" from the people identified by research as social norm entrepreneurs (Gomila et al., 2023), social referents (Paluck and Shepherd, 2012), or individuals who are less identified with mainstream norms (Dannals and Miller, 2017). ...
How are ordinary people aected by the experience of stepping out against
conventions that are central to their community?We conducted a field experiment
in New York City to study Satmar Hasidic women’s personal reactions to deviating
from their community’s high-end clothing norm by wearing an inexpensive plain
dress (treatment) vs. carrying a prayer book (normative placebo) for one day.
We find that women’s experience of deviation from their community norm of
high-end dressing was strongly uncomfortable, but was not internalized as new
attitudes or self-perceptions. Instead, we find that the experience with deviance
mostly aected women’s perceptions of their community, in terms of their
closeness to the community and to some of its central tenets, and the community
norm of high end dressing. In this setting, the experience of individual deviation
seems to change perceptions of the context—its norms and our relationship to our
community—over perceptions of the self and of deviant action. The results of this
study help to map out a theory of community and social change that accounts for
individuals’ anticipation of deviance and social experiences alone, together, and
over time that aect their decisions about whether to participate in change.
... Prescriptive norms, finally, set forth how people ought to behave based on justifications that are independent from either how people actually behave or how they think people should behave. Empirical researchers consider a norm to be prescriptive if it has been morally evaluated (Samland & Waldmann, 2016), if it is morally ideal (Bear & Knobe, 2017), or if the majority of people affected by the norm consider it to be acceptable (Dannals & Miller, 2017). Within philosophy, researchers have justified norms as being prescriptive if they satisfy "certain conditions" that have been specified (Kalantari & Luntley, 2013: 420). ...
Research on ethical norms has grown in recent years, but imprecise language has made it unclear when these norms prescribe “what ought to be” and when they merely describe behaviors or perceptions (“what is”). Studies of ethical norms, moreover, tend not to investigate whether participants were influenced by the prescriptive aspect of the norm; the studies primarily demonstrate, rather, that people will mimic the behaviors or perceptions of others, which provides evidence for the already well-substantiated social proof theory. In this review article, we delineate three streams of norms research in business ethics: behavioral, perceptual, and prescriptive. We argue that by properly categorizing norms, and designing studies to investigate when prescriptions, more than mere mimicry, improve ethical outcomes in organizations, researchers can enhance managers’ efforts to promote ethical outcomes in organizations.
... Stereotype change tracks these differences in probability. Kunda and Oleson (1997) investigated the impact of deviance magnitude (along a single trait) on stereotype change, finding that moderate deviants produced more stereotype change than extreme deviants (see also Dannals & Miller, 2017). Our model recapitulates this finding (Fig. 3). 10 We manipulated deviance magnitude by setting one of the traits to a range of values varying between -1 and 1. ...
Why, when, and how do stereotypes change? This paper develops a computational account based on the principles of structure learning: stereotypes are governed by probabilistic beliefs about the assignment of individuals to groups. Two aspects of this account are particularly important. First, groups are flexibly constructed based on the distribution of traits across individuals; groups are not fixed, nor are they assumed to map on to categories we have to provide to the model. This allows the model to explain the phenomena of group discovery and subtyping, whereby deviant individuals are segregated from a group, thus protecting the group’s stereotype. Second, groups are hierarchically structured, such that groups can be nested. This allows the model to explain the phenomenon of subgrouping, whereby a collection of deviant individuals is organized into a refinement of the superordinate group. The structure learning account also sheds light on several factors that determine stereotype change, including perceived group variability, individual typicality, cognitive load, and sample size.
