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Prevailing theory assumes that people enforce norms in order to pressure others to act in ways that they approve. Yet there are numerous examples of "unpopular norms" in which people compel each other to do things that they privately disapprove. While peer sanctioning suggests a ready explanation for why people conform to unpopular norms, it is harder to understand why they would enforce a norm they privately oppose. The authors argue that people enforce unpopular norms to show that they have complied out of genuine conviction and not because of social pressure. They use laboratory experiments to demonstrate this "false enforcement" in the context of a wine tasting and an academic text evaluation. Both studies find that participants who conformed to a norm due to social pressure then falsely enforced the norm by publicly criticizing a lone deviant. A third study shows that enforcement of a norm effectively signals the enforcer's genuine support for the norm. These results demonstrate the potential for a vicious cycle in which perceived pressures to conform to and falsely enforce an unpopular norm reinforce one another.

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Contrary to the popular assumption that extensive relational obligations and high levels of conformity are crucial for sustaining interpersonal trust, a growing body of research has found lower levels of trust in collectivist societies than in individualist countries (Yamagishi and Yamagishi 1994;

A recent debate in sociological exchange theory concerns which form of exchange is likely to promote cohesion in exchange relations. One side maintains that bilateral exchange, often associated with economic transactions, entails joint action to share mutual benefits, contributing more to feelings of cohesion than do independent acts of unilateral giving from one person to another, typical of social exchange. The other side argues that bilateral exchange requires dividing resources under binding terms of exchange, which strains relationships by underscoring competitive aspects of exchange. The present study reconciles these divergent claims by testing a new model of exchange that combines key propositions from past theories to specify when bilateral exchange promotes or undermines cohesion. Results from two laboratory experiments provide support for the model’s core claim that cooperative forms of bilateral exchange can reinforce cohesion more than unilateral exchange does, contrary to the enduring assumption that economic exchange undermines relational bonds.