Individuals adapt how they punish social norm violations through social observation

Metanorms are informal rules about how to react to social norm violations. Since metanorms vary across groups, individuals must adapt their metanorms to match their local social environment's expectations. However, little is known about the mechanisms through which individuals learn and update their metanorms. The present study sought to investigate if individuals can use social observation, here observing the punitive behaviors of others, to adapt their metanorms.

In an online task, 314 Canadian participants were asked to select a reaction (inaction, gossip, exclusion or confrontation) to a set of social norm violations before and after observing others who mostly used one type of punishment when faced with new social norm violations.

The results suggest that individuals use social observation to adapt their metanorms. Indeed, participants increased their use of the punishment they observed after observing others. This adaptation was characterized by a generalization effect suggesting that metanorm adaptation operates at an abstract level to identify the general patterns of reactions within a given social environment.

These findings provide initial evidence that metanorms can be shaped through social learning, opening new research directions to explore how this process varies across cultures, demographic groups and real-world social contexts.