Residential Mobility Decreases Neural Responses to Social Norm Violation

Abstract

Social norms are essential, but they vary across cultures and societies. With the internationalization of human society, population mobility has greatly increased, especially in developing countries, which can have an impact on people’s psychological states and behaviors and result in sociocultural change. The current research used three studies to examine the hypothesis that residential mobility plays a crucial role in the perception of social norm violations. Study 1 used an association test and found that residential mobility was correlated with the perception of both weak and strong social norm violations in females. Study 2 combined electroencephalography and found a negative differential N400 between weak social norm violations and appropriate behavior between residentially mobile and stable mindsets, suggesting that residential mobility modulates individuals’ detection of social norm-violating behavior. Study 3 revealed that residential mobility does not have a similar effect on semantic violations, which indicates that the effect of residential mobility does not occur in non-social norm violations. Our findings provide insight into how and why individuals’ detection of social norm-violating behaviors varies according to the dynamic development of society. As residential mobility continues to increase worldwide, especially in developing countries, more attention should be paid to the concomitant impact during the course of sociocultural change to build a better strategy for cultural specific social governance.

Influence of perceived social support on detection of social norm violation: evidence from N1 and N400

“…Continuous data were algorithmically corrected for the possible artifacts (eye movements and blinks, cardiac signals, muscle noise, and line noise) by independent component analysis (ICA). The corrected data were epoched into a 1,200 ms time window with a 200 ms prestimulus baseline in the social norm violation task, consistent with previous research ( Mu et al, 2015 ; Luo et al, 2019 ). Epochs that exceeded ±60 μV were omitted from the average.…”

“…For ERP data, the time windows for N1 and N400 were determined based on previous ERP studies ( Mu et al, 2015 ; Luo et al, 2019 ; Goto et al, 2022 ; Zhan et al, 2022 ) and the visual observation on the grand average ERPs of the current study. Specifically, the time windows were set as and 80–160 ms for N1and 250–450 ms for N400.…”

“…This study suggests that the N400 effect reflects a cognitive conflict experienced by individuals when perceiving others engaging in inappropriate behavior within specific social contexts. Subsequently, a series of studies further confirmed that the N400 is indeed an indicator of social violation (Luo et al, 2019;Salvador et al, 2020a,b;Goto et al, 2022). Research generally suggests that the N1 component reflects rapid and automatic intuition processes during decisionmaking, representing the primary processing of relevant information such as goodness, badness, truth, and falsehood (Scheele et al, 2014;Gui et al, 2016).…”

“…The rectangle with a red frame is the crucial word (e.g., singing) for generating ERP components. (Mu et al, 2015;Luo et al, 2019). Epochs that exceeded ±60 μV were omitted from the average.…”

“…Across conditions, the mean trial accept rate was 95.86%, with no significant difference between conditions (low perceived social support + conformity: 96.70%, low perceived social support + violation: 96.18%, high perceived social support + conformity: 95.61%, high perceived social support + violation: 94.94%). For ERP data, the time windows for N1 and N400 were determined based on previous ERP studies (Mu et al, 2015;Luo et al, 2019;Goto et al, 2022;Zhan et al, 2022) and the visual observation on the grand average ERPs of the current study. Specifically, the time windows were set as and 80-160 ms for N1and 250-450 ms for N400.…”