How do social norms vary across societies?

There are social norms about most aspects of life. Food, speech, clothes, and hygiene are just a few examples of important domains in which people have opinions on what is and isn’t appropriate and certain expectations about others’ behavior. Moreover, depending on how others behave people have feelings about them and may act on these feelings.

An important reason why people sometimes break social norms is that people don’t necessarily agree on what the norms are in the first place. One person can think that X is a perfectly acceptable thing to do while someone else thinks X is clearly inappropriate. Differences in social norms may be particularly stark when people come from different cultural backgrounds. Those who grow up in a society where people generally expect certain behavior and then travel to another part of the world may find that some social norms are very different and other social norms are very similar.

Global social norms studies aim at documenting how social norms vary across the globe and testing theories about why. In the international network for global social norms studies (GSN), researchers from many different countries collaborate on conducting such studies.

On this website you can find information about the network and the studies we do.