Norms work because everyone expects everyone else to follow them
Most of the rules that shape daily life were never written down or voted on. Nobody decreed them, yet people follow them, largely because they expect others to do the same and to notice if they do not. Break one and you rarely face a court, only a frown, a warning or a cold shoulder.
A social norm is a shared standard of acceptable behaviour within a group. Unlike private ideas, attitudes or values, a norm concerns what people do and belongs to the group, not the individual. Norms can stay informal or be hardened into rules and laws, and they shift with context, community and era. Laws, in this view, are simply the most formal kind, and the two can clash, as when the law forbids something that local custom quietly tolerates.
Definitions vary widely. In 1965 the sociologist Jack Gibbs boiled them down to three elements: a shared judgement of how people ought to act, a shared expectation of how they will act, and reactions that reward or punish conduct. The game theorist Peyton Young describes norms as self-enforcing patterns: people conform because they expect others to conform and want to fit in when they do. In his view norms coordinate expectations in situations where several outcomes are possible, and they usually evolve from countless interactions, not from any design.
Why do people obey? One explanation is a logic of appropriateness, doing what feels socially right. Another is a logic of consequences, weighing costs and benefits. Evolutionary accounts add that norms stabilise because bystanders are willing to punish those who break them.
Scholars describe a life cycle in three stages. First, norm entrepreneurs campaign for a new behaviour. Next comes a cascade, as acceptance spreads widely. Finally the norm is internalised and comes to seem simply obvious. Some norms remain fragile and are broken often, while others are held so deeply that violations are rare. Their presence shows up in the patterns of how groups behave and in the way members talk about what is expected.
Source: Social norm
