The emergence of deviance: Experiments testing the personal effects of violating a social norm

Abstract

Social norms are powerful drivers of human behavior. Norms often override personal material interests and preferences. What happens when people violate norms? We conducted two randomized experiments (N = 3,499) to explore the behavioral and psychological consequences of deviating from norms. Participants played social dilemma games governed by norms of cooperation, without a mechanism for players to punish one another. Participants assigned to the treatment condition, unlike those in the control condition, were offered a monetary incentive to deviate from a strong norm of cooperation in one round of the game. Violating this norm significantly increased their propensity to violate other social norms in new settings involving new groups and new games (with no incentive to deviate). Post-treatment survey data suggest that violating norms causes people to depreciate their expectation of the costs associated with violation, but does not lead them to update their views of the self. The finding that social experience causally impacts an individual's tendency to deviate represents a new finding in the norms and deviance literature. Together, these results challenge and inform traditional views of deviance as personality or a stable individual motivation or trait.

Situating and extending the sense of should

“…That is, through repeatedly violating norms, one may extinguish the anticipatory anxiety that contributes to the sense of should in these contexts. Again, we completely agree, and recent empirical evidence supports this hypothesis [38] . But this point also highlights—somewhat shockingly—that the foundation of our social stability may be built on thin ice: the motivational glue keeping social structures together is only a subtle affective nudge toward not exploring the consequences of particular norm-violating actions , and it can be overcome with practice.…”