Most of the time, social norms are useful parameters to live by. They provide us with roadmaps for a variety of social situations, and offer a common foundation for interactions within a culture or society. By aligning our behavior with these shared expectations, we reduce uncertainty, avoid social friction, and create a sense of belonging within our communities. Norms also help maintain order and predictability, guiding everything from how we queue in public spaces to how we express gratitude or disagreement in conversation. Just ask any British person about the sanctity of queuing in the United Kingdom, and you’ll soon realize how powerful social norms can be in a society. 

Across all cultures, social norms can influence our decision-making processes, either for better or worse. In many societies, there is a strong social expectation to help those in need, such as holding the door open for someone carrying bags or giving up your seat for an elderly person. In these situations, the norm shapes an individual’s decision to act kindly, even if there’s no direct benefit for them. This is a positive influence, as it promotes prosocial behavior and fosters a sense of care and connection within communities. However, in some countries, a prevailing social norm encourages early marriage for teenage girls. In these contexts, the social norm may pressure families to withdraw their daughters from school before the age of 18. This decision can have a negative impact not only on the girls’ learning but also on their mental health and future economic prospects. 

One study by Luke Chang and Alan Sanfey examined how our expectations about fairness influence the decisions we make in social situations.³ Using a game where one person offers to split money and the other can accept or reject the offer (called the Ultimatum Game), the researchers found that people don’t just react to unfairness—they actually react to whether the offer meets or violates their expectations of what’s fair. fMRI scans showed that a specific area of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, became more active when people received offers that went against their social expectations. This suggests that our brains track violations of social norms much like they track mistakes or surprises, and that our decisions are heavily shaped by these expectations.

In some situations, our tendency to follow social norms can veer into conformity, leading us to behave in harmful ways or holding us back from taking action. If someone witnesses bullying at school or harassment in the workplace, they might stay silent because no one else is speaking up. Even if they know it’s wrong, the social norm of staying quiet or going along with the group can pressure them into conforming, preventing them from intervening or offering support.

The desire to “fit in” and to avoid being the one who goes against the grain can also stifle dissenting or alternative opinions. This is particularly challenging when considering political correctness and voicing beliefs that appear to go against the status quo. Research shows that social norms of political correctness can influence individuals' willingness to express nonconforming views, even when those views are sincerely held. Across a wide range of sensitive topics and contexts, studies have found that people often self-censor in politically charged environments due to concerns about social backlash or reputational damage, rather than changes in personal belief.⁴ 

More importantly, norms can give rise to pluralistic ignorance, where we wrongly assume our beliefs or feelings differ from those of the majority, and therefore choose to stay silent. If individuals feel an overwhelming pressure to conform to prevailing norms, this can lead to silencing or avoidance of honest dialogue, potentially narrowing public discourse and discouraging open debate.

Social norms have been shown to play an important role in structuring economic life, particularly in the definition and division of property, in contract terms, and the assignment of social roles. Economist Herbert Gintis argues that economic behavior cannot be fully explained by rational self-interest alone.⁵ Instead, it is often shaped by social norms that are internalized and enforced through informal mechanisms like approval, shame, or exclusion. Gintis emphasizes that norms evolve culturally and are often self-sustaining, as people comply with them not just out of fear of punishment, but because they have internalized the values these norms represent. This challenges traditional economic models, which generally assume that individuals act out of self-interest in order to maximize their personal utility or profit. 

Companies and brands can leverage social norms to encourage certain consumer behaviors. For example, by placing “8 out of 10 people choose this energy-efficient appliance” or “The preferred diaper brand of new moms” on the packaging of a product, the potential buyer may feel subtly pressured to follow the crowd and buy it. These messages tap into subjective norms—our tendency to assume that if many people are doing something, it must be the correct or popular choice. This can be especially persuasive in moments of uncertainty, when consumers rely on social cues to guide their decisions. By framing products as socially endorsed or widely used, marketers can effectively increase trust, credibility, and the likelihood of purchase.⁶

One study in China looked at how social norms impact people’s willingness to buy domestic products.⁷ The researchers wanted to understand not just whether social norms affect consumer behavior, but how they do so. They explored four possible pathways: a direct influence, a motivational influence through personal beliefs (consumer ethnocentrism), a cognitive influence via product judgments, and a combined motivational-cognitive path.

The researchers surveyed 346 Chinese consumers and found that pro-domestic social norms—the belief that others approve of or expect one to buy domestic products—had the strongest influence on consumers’ intention to purchase local goods. These norms shaped behavior both directly, by encouraging conformity, and indirectly, by increasing positive beliefs about domestic products and reinforcing consumer ethnocentrism (the idea that buying local is morally or economically right). In contrast, anti-foreign norms (such as social disapproval of buying foreign goods) had little to no impact on purchasing behavior.

Unsurprisingly, social norms not only affect what products individuals purchase but also how those products are designed. In the fashion industry, trends change quickly. For clothing brands to stay afloat, they must keep up with current styles. In the era of social media and influencers, many trends are guided by what is popular online, creating social norms of what’s “cool”. 

Changing social norms affects which—and how—products are manufactured. For example, the Conscious Consumer Spending Index (CCSI) consistently reports an upward trend in ethical shopping, since consumers seem to value social responsibility more than ever before.⁸ If demand for socially responsible and pro-environmental clothing increases, the supply for that type of clothing will inevitably respond. 

While already implicated in multiple spheres of research, using AI to identify social norms and the violation of those norms can standardize experiments in social psychology and computational science. Researchers Neuman and Cohen ran two experiments regarding social norms and AI.⁹ They found that various platforms could accurately identify social norms such as politeness, trust, and agreeableness. Later testing for AI’s ability to recognize violations of norms, the researchers observed some success with a promising future and the ability to improve. This preliminary study can change how we conduct social sciences research, such as personality analysis based on people's personal norms.

There’s also growing evidence that social norms derived from human-human interactions are also relevant to how we interact with AI. A meta-analysis of politeness within human-machine interactions across various AI systems looked at AI politeness toward humans, and human politeness toward AI.¹⁰ Regarding the former, the evidence suggests that systems equipped with social competencies, including politeness, are valued more highly and thus gain greater user acceptance compared to ‘rude.’ Some people also tend to have greater trust in automated systems that demonstrate social norms around politeness. 

What motivates individuals to show politeness toward technological devices? Research shows that when interacting with technology that provides social cues, individuals unconsciously apply the same basic social rules and norms that guide their interactions with other humans, effectively treating technological devices as social beings.¹¹ Similarly, interactions characterized by impolite behavior toward AI systems may negatively influence users, particularly children, reinforcing the need for politeness in human–machine communication. 

There are several reasons why applying human social norms to AI interactions may benefit users. First, when users are polite, their prompts tend to be more precise, leading to more detailed, understandable, and helpful responses from the AI agent.¹² Second, the social norm of being polite to AI may even help to reinforce our own good social norms and expectations, according to Dr. Eduardo Benitez Sandoval, a social robotics researcher at the School of Art & Design, UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture.¹² He argues that our interactions with robots and AI agents give us a better understanding of the human condition, and so by being polite to AI, we can reflect on how we value and respect our fellow humans. Kind of like a mirror of the sort of behavior we wish to see in the world. 

When social psychologists and behavioral scientists talk about social norms, they are usually less interested in specific cultural practices (like handshakes) than they are in broad tendencies in human behavior. A lot of research in this area has explored normative influence on people’s actions—in other words, how people’s behavior is influenced by the behavior of others around them. These studies have shown that people are often swayed by simply observing how others act, even when they haven’t been told to behave in a specific way.

One study, conducted by Elliot Aronson and Michael O’Leary in the 1980s, investigated whether social norms affected students’ water consumption.² At the time, Aronson and O’Leary were at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where drought is a recurrent problem. The university had put signage in campus shower rooms asking students to conserve water by turning off the shower while they soaped up. Despite the signs, only 6% of students were following this request. So, the researchers recruited a few male students to participate in an experiment.

One student, the appointed role model, entered the shower room, turned on the shower, and waited until he heard somebody else come in. At that point, the role model turned off the shower to soap up, as the sign instructed. When the role model finished his shower and exited the room, another student, the observer, would enter to see whether or not the other student had followed suit. The researchers found that 49% of students followed the behavior of the role model, and when a second role model was added, 67% conformed.

Beyond the general tendency for people to act in the same way others do, there are a few specific norms that often guide people’s behavior, such as the norm of reciprocity—the fact that we usually feel compelled to return the favor when somebody else does something nice for us.

In another experiment from 2009, demonstrating the power of reciprocity, participants were told that the study was about “cognitive perceptual skills” and were given various tasks to complete. At some point during the experiment, a confederate—somebody posing as a participant who was actually in on the experiment—got up to use the restroom. She returned with several water bottles, which she dolled out to half of the participants. Later, the confederate asked the participants if they would be willing to complete a survey for a research project. Participants who had received a water bottle from the confederate were significantly more likely to fill out the survey, returning the favor.³

It’s clear that social norms can have a strong influence on our behavior. But why is this the case? In situations where we feel uncertain about what is going on and how to act, we might follow the behaviors of others simply because it’s our best bet. But most of the time, our adherence to social norms has more to do with evolutionary pressures and with our desire to see ourselves in a certain light.

We have evolved to crave acceptance

One of the strongest drivers of human behavior is our need for belonging. Humans are social creatures, and there’s an important reason why: in prehistoric times, there was no other way to survive. In a harsh and unforgiving ancient environment, it was crucial to maintain good relationships with others and to be part of a collective. Operating as a group allowed humans to hunt larger animals, better defend themselves from predators or enemies, share food and resources with one another, and more. The individuals who survived long enough to pass on their genes to the next generation were most likely those who had close ties with the rest of their tribe.⁴

In the modern age, we may no longer need the help of our comrades to bring down a woolly mammoth, but our brains still retain the neural hardwiring of our ancestors. The need for belonging and the desire for closeness with others are considered fundamental human motivations.⁴ Social connection is so integral to our existence that a lack of it is detrimental to our physical health. In one meta-analysis that reviewed the findings of 148 studies on social isolation and mortality, researchers found that people with strong social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival.⁵ 

By following social norms, we avoid ruffling any feathers and risking rejection by others. Some specific norms, such as the norm of reciprocity—the desire to repay and return favors— also seem to exist specifically to enhance our relationships with other people and to create a sense of group harmony.

We want to protect our self-concept

Another fundamental human need, alongside belongingness, is the need to maintain a positive image of ourselves. One way to do this is to keep our behavior consistent with the norms and values that we gradually internalize as we grow up.

As we’re maturing, we learn the norms of our society both through observation and direct reinforcement. Certain behaviors are rewarded, while others are punished. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have a firm set of values and a particular idea of how a “good person” behaves. And since we all want to see ourselves as good people, we often hold ourselves to the standards set by the norms we’ve internalized in order to protect our own self-concept.⁶

There is experimental evidence to back up this idea. In a study from 2000, researchers had participants fill out a questionnaire that assessed how strong their attitudes were about littering.8 They then had them complete a task while researchers monitored their heart rate and their skin conductance response (how much they were sweating), which required putting a special paste on one of their palms. While participants did the tasks, they were also looking at a TV monitor, which either showed an image of themselves doing the task (the “internal focus” group) or a series of geometric shapes (the “external focus” group).

After the task was finished, they were given a paper towel to remove the paste from their hands. What the participants didn’t realize is that the researchers would be checking to see whether they littered, dropping the paper in the stairwell. The results showed that for people who were strongly against littering, the internal focus condition significantly decreased the amount of littering. Conversely, for people who didn’t really care about litter to begin with, the specific condition didn’t have much of an effect. Why? The researchers argue that seeing themselves on a TV screen made people more aware of their self-concepts and made them more likely to act in a way that was consistent with their internalized norms and values.

Following social norms is not necessarily a bad thing—in fact, having shared norms is important to promote a sense of social cohesion between members of a society or culture. That said, following social norms can sometimes hold us back if it makes us afraid to stand out, and they can blind us to the variety of opinions and attitudes that people actually hold.

Norms can be exploited

Social norms can be exploited to manipulate people’s behavior. Our habit of adhering to certain social norms (such as being polite or cooperative)  is easily taken advantage of by people trying to persuade us to act in a certain way—especially people looking to sell us something. One common example is the “door-in-the-face” technique, which capitalizes on the social norm of reciprocity. The technique typically starts with a salesperson making a large request (like asking someone to buy an expensive product), knowing it will likely be rejected. Then, they follow up with a smaller, more reasonable request (like a cheaper item), which the person is now more likely to accept. This works because of a social norm around reciprocity. After saying “no” to the first offer, people often feel a subtle pressure to agree to the second one as a form of compromise or goodwill. 

In a 1975 study by Cialdini et al., the researchers asked people if they’d be willing to commit to two years of volunteering at a juvenile detention center.¹⁹ After being turned down, they pulled back and asked people if they’d instead consider committing to a single volunteer session. In each trial, this strategy produced more compliance with the smaller favor than the scenario in which the requester asked for the smaller favor alone. 

As this study demonstrates, people are more likely to agree to the second request because they feel like the other party has made a concession for them, and they are inclined to reciprocate. Of course, when salespeople use this trick, they haven’t actually conceded anything; this was the plan all along. Awareness of social norms' role in marketing can help avoid being suckered using strategies like the door-in-the-face technique.

Conformity can compromise decision-making

There is a fine line between following social norms and taking conformity too far. Normative behavior simply involves acting the same way other people do, like shaking hands to greet people. But extreme conformity can lead us to act differently, like endorsing an opinion we disagree with.

The most famous demonstration of conformity is a series of studies from 1951 known as the Asch experiments, which demonstrated that people sometimes conform to a group’s judgment—even when that judgment is unambiguously wrong. When people came in to participate in Solomon Asch’s study, they sat down in a room full of other people they believed were also participants. In fact, everybody else was a confederate. Asch then showed the group a straight line (line X) next to three other lines. The group’s job was to pick which of the three lines was closest in length to X. It sounds ridiculously easy, except that, due to the confusion of the actual participants, everybody else in the group consistently chose the obviously wrong line. The result showed that around 35% of people conformed with their group’s incorrect choice.²⁹ 
This experiment is a prime example of how social norms can influence the decision-making process; individuals conform to the majority’s flawed decision to avoid the risk of rejection by the group. 

Norms give us false ideas about what other people think

When the majority conforms to a social norm, we tend to assume that everybody else agrees with that norm. This gives rise to a phenomenon known as pluralistic ignorance, when people privately hold an attitude or belief that’s different from the norm, but continue to publicly follow the norm because they believe they’re the only one who feels this way. This can create a sense of pressure to follow the crowd out of fear of being rejected, when in fact, others might be perfectly accepting of alternative opinions.

In one study illustrating pluralistic ignorance, researchers at Princeton University asked students about their comfort with drinking alcohol and their beliefs about the average student’s comfort level.⁹ They found that students systematically believed they were more uncomfortable with alcohol than their peers, when this wasn’t the reality. In other words, most students mistakenly believed their interest in alcohol was lower than the student culture demanded. Over time, the students—interestingly, the male students in particular—shifted their attitudes in the direction of what they wrongfully believed to be the norm.

Misperceiving reality like this can end up having harmful consequences. For instance, in this study, male students apparently dealt with this gap in attitudes by increasing the amount of alcohol they drank, while female students became more alienated from the university as time went by. If people felt less constrained by social norms, and more students were willing to speak up, both of these outcomes could have been avoided, as the students could easily have found somebody who shared their opinion.

It’s often more comfortable to go along with the behavior of others than it is to challenge it. To avoid the more dangerous aspects of following social norms, awareness of them is a good place to start. Here are some specific strategies you can use to lessen the power of social norms.

Take some time before returning a favor

The norm of reciprocity can be exploited. If someone tries to make you feel indebted, they have the potential to influence your behavior. However, research shows that this feeling of obligation fades over time. In one study, people were given an opportunity to return a favor either five minutes or one week after initially being given a small gift. By the time one week had elapsed, the norm of reciprocity had more or less disappeared.¹¹

Wherever possible, try to take some time before acting on the impulse to reciprocate—especially in the context of sales, marketing, or any scenario in which a person stands to gain by manipulating you. This helps to see the situation in a clearer light and provides a chance to ask yourself whether you truly owe the other party something.

Try red-teaming

Red-teaming is a group decision-making strategy in which one person is assigned the role of challenging the prevailing opinion to expose potential weaknesses in the process.¹² Inviting this kind of feedback is hugely valuable to avoid conformity, as it provides a cover for people with differing viewpoints who are otherwise afraid to speak up. 

Practice being unconventional

For most of us, going against the grain isn’t easy and can provoke a lot of anxiety. To deal with this, author and business coach Peter Bregman recommends practicing nonconformity in small ways, in order to build up a tolerance for being the odd one out.¹³ Small gestures, like passing on dessert when everyone else is partaking, or keeping your own workplace clean even if everyone else’s is messy, can help get you accustomed to resisting the pull of “normative” behavior. 

Emotion can be a powerful catalyst for social norm change through nonconformity. A study by researchers at Stanford University shows that people may emotionally turn against their group when they believe the group isn’t reacting appropriately to injustice—especially by failing to feel emotions like guilt or anger.³² This kind of emotional nonconformity can lead individuals to push for change, even when others conform to the group dynamic. This research highlights how small “deviant” subgroups, driven by ‘nonconforming’ moral emotions, can challenge and eventually shift group norms and behaviors over time.

The study of social norms has its roots in early sociological and philosophical thought, particularly in the works of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber during the 19th century. Durkheim emphasized that social norms function as the “social facts” that guide and constrain individual behavior, existing outside the individual but exerting a powerful influence. Meanwhile, Weber explored how norms are tied to meaningful social actions and the roles individuals adopt within society.

Over time, theorists began to distinguish between norms as internalized values and external expectations enforced through social sanctions. By the mid-20th century, economists, game theorists, and philosophers began formalizing these ideas, analyzing how norms emerge, persist, and shift depending on incentives, coordination problems, and mutual expectations.

One of the earliest experiments on social norms and conformity was conducted by Muzafer Sherif in 1936. In this study, often referred to as the autokinetic effect study, Sherif showed that people’s perceptions of objects (or at least, how they reported their perceptions) were influenced by what others were saying.^1,10 

The experiment involved placing participants in a dark room and asking them to watch a small point of light projected onto a screen. Because of the autokinetic effect, the stationary light appears to move, even though it doesn’t actually move. The movement is an illusion caused by small, involuntary eye movements.

Participants were asked to estimate how far the light moved. During the first phase, they were alone when they were asked. In the second phase, they were in groups. When tested individually, the participants gave varying estimates, since the task was ambiguous and there was no objective reference point. When the participants were put into small groups and asked to call out their estimates publicly, their responses slowly changed. In fact, over time, they began to converge and formed a group norm, even though they were seeing the same light illusion. Sherif’s experiment demonstrated that in ambiguous situations, people look to others around them for guidance and tend to adjust their own judgments to align with the group.

Later, after World War II and the Holocaust, social psychologists started to take a very strong interest in social norms and conformity, hoping to understand why so many Germans complied with the systematic murder of so many people. This gave rise to some of the best-known studies in social psychology, including the Asch experiments and the infamous Milgram experiment demonstrating authority bias. 

Over the course of the twentieth century, anthropologists have looked at social norms from all angles, from how they function in different cultures²² to how they motivate people to act.²³ Today, social norms theory is used to influence people’s behaviors, often through behavioral ‘nudges.’ Governments or local organizations, for example, might use norm-based messaging as part of strategic social norms interventions to influence behaviors around recycling, energy conservation, or vaccination.²⁶ In lower- and middle-income countries, social norms theory is used to address challenges such as adolescent health and female genital cutting, child marriage, and intimate partner violence.²⁷ These interventions typically use a social norms approach, which attempts to leverage the misalignment between people’s individual actions and behaviors and the subjective norms and injunctive norms around them.

Social norms can encourage people to improve their behavior if they feel like they’re not measuring up to others. Yet they can also do the opposite: make people feel like they have a free pass to slack off if they’ve been above-average up until now. This is known as a boomerang effect.

In a study from 2011, Hunter Allcott, Professor of Environmental Social Sciences at Stanford University, wanted to know whether he could use social norms to persuade people to conserve more energy.³⁰ In attempts to reverse the boomerang effect, households received letters indicating social approval or disapproval (an injunctive norm) of the amount of energy they were saving, comparing their consumption level to surrounding houses.  If households were consuming less energy than average, they got a smiley face. If they were consuming more energy than average, they would receive a sad face. As a result, households that used more energy than their neighbors significantly reduced their consumption. Theoretically, households that initially spent less energy than their neighbors would, according to the boomerang effect, increase their energy consumption. However, Allcott found that for these houses, energy consumption remained more or less unchanged. While the addition of a cartoon smiley face might seem like a trivial thing, it worked to change people’s behavior: the boomerang effect disappeared when people also received an injunctive norm. 

You may have heard of “broken windows” policing, a theory of law enforcement suggesting that cracking down on low-level offenses can help prevent more serious crimes. This policy was originally written about in The Atlantic by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, and was based on a 1969 study by the social psychologist Philip Zimbardo.³⁴ According to the article, Zimbardo had demonstrated that when a car’s window was smashed, people were much more likely to vandalize it, because the broken window signaled a social norm of damaging property.

The problem with this theory is that it’s based on a misinterpretation of Zimbardo’s original work.³⁵ As part of Zimbardo’s research, he and his students had planned to damage a car to slightly encourage would-be vandals. But they went too far and ended up trashing the vehicle completely. In other words, the researchers themselves laid waste to the car—not a random passerby who saw a broken window and immediately went ballistic.¹⁴ Although other studies have later affirmed the broken windows theory, the methodology and statistical analyses behind those studies have been criticized as “mediocre” by some researchers.¹⁵ While social norms can influence us strongly, their power only goes so far.

What it is

Social norms are unspoken rules about how people “should” behave in certain situations. We internalize social norms as we grow up, and we infer them from other people’s behavior. The instinct to follow social norms can have a powerful effect on our actions.

Why it happens

We have evolved to crave human contact and fear rejection; following social norms improves our chances of being accepted by other people. Upholding norms can also allow us to enhance our own self-concepts.

Example 1 - Norms and energy conservation

A 2011 study found that adding injunctive norms—like smiley or sad faces indicating social approval or disapproval—helped reduce household energy use. High-consuming households cut back significantly, while low-consuming households did not increase usage, avoiding what’s known as the “boomerang effect.”

Example 2 - Broken windows theory and its problems

The broken windows theory has informed policing in America for decades, but it’s based on a misrepresentation of an experiment by Philip Zimbardo. Social norms are certainly powerful, but not as powerful as some advocates of broken windows policing would have you believe.

How to avoid it

Taking time before returning a favor can help us avoid being exploited via the norm of reciprocity. To stop social norms from affecting our decision-making, building criticism into the process is useful. Practicing nonconformity can also help people get used to being the odd one out.

Three Thought Patterns Which Let Advertisers Influence You on Social Media

Our desire to be accepted by the majority is easily preyed upon by advertisers—especially in the age of social media. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are constantly sending us signals about what “most” people like, and nudging our behavior by using metrics such as “likes” and “follows.” This article explores the role of social norms in marketing, as well as other biases to look out for.

Drone Policy (1/3): Reducing the Human Cost

The invention of drones for use in combat has created a massive ethical conundrum. Even more troubling, drone strikes by the U.S. government are now known to have killed a huge number of civilians, instead of their intended targets. Why are drone strikes still seen as an acceptable mode of warfare? This article looks at the role of social norms in America’s drone policy, specifically how the bystander effect and pluralistic ignorance allow strikes to continue.