Katarzyna Growiec

Norms are fundamental to social life, but basic questions about how they are affected by social context remain. Specifically, how do normative constraints depend on the presence and status of observers, and how do such relational contingencies vary across cultures? Using data from more than 25,000 individuals across 90 societies, we test several hypotheses linking normative constraints on everyday behaviors (like arguing, laughing, cursing, kissing, and crying), to the presence and status of observers. We find that behaviors widely viewed as appropriate in private become more constrained in the presence of others (an observer effect), and even more so when those others are higher in status (a status effect). Both observer and status effects are culturally universal, but the observer effect shows more variation across cultures. In particular, we find that observer effects are larger in societies that emphasize individualizing moral foundations, that is, avoiding harm and unfairness to others, because these societies are more permissive of actions when others are not around. The relative stability of status effects across cultural contexts suggests a universal tendency to defer in social hierarchies. These findings shed light on the relational contingency of everyday norms and underscore the role of such norms in the maintenance of social order and reproduction of inequality.

People vary in their tolerance for uncertainty, and this motivation—known as Need for Cognitive Closure (NFC)—can shape social behavior. Individuals high in NFC are driven to avoid ambiguity and quickly resolve uncertainty. Because interacting with similar others (homophily) tends to reduce uncertainty, while engaging with dissimilar others (heterophily) can increase it, we examined whether NFC predicts preferences for homophilous over heterophilous interactions. Across four correlational studies and a preregistered experiment, we found that higher NFC was consistently associated with lower heterophily. Meta-analytic results confirmed the robustness of this association across samples. High-NFC individuals also reported fewer acquaintances and fewer people to discuss important matters with. To investigate whether uncertainty reduction motivates these patterns, we experimentally induced uncertainty and assessed participants’ social preferences. As predicted, uncertainty reduced interest in interacting with dissimilar others, especially among individuals high in NFC. These findings suggest that a fundamental motivation to reduce uncertainty influences the diversity and composition of people’s social networks. This has broader implications for social support, the construction of shared realities, and the persistence of group-based stereotypes.

Every social situation that people encounter in their daily lives comes with a set of unwritten rules about what behavior is considered appropriate or inappropriate. These everyday norms can vary across societies: some societies may have more permissive norms in general or for certain behaviors, or for certain behaviors in specific situations. In a preregistered survey of 25,422 participants across 90 societies, we map societal differences in 150 everyday norms and show that they can be explained by how societies prioritize individualizing moral foundations such as care and liberty versus binding moral foundations such as purity. Specifically, societies with more individualistic morality tend to have more permissive norms in general (greater liberty) and especially for behaviors deemed vulgar (less purity), but they exhibit less permissive norms for behaviors perceived to have negative consequences in specific situations (greater care). By comparing our data with available data collected twenty years ago, we find a global pattern of change toward more permissive norms overall but less permissive norms for the most vulgar and inconsiderate behaviors. This study explains how social norms vary across behaviors, situations, societies, and time.

The Triple Dominance Measure (choosing between prosocial, individualistic, and competitive options) and the Slider Measure (“sliding” between various orientations, for example, from individualistic to prosocial) are two widely used techniques to measure social value orientation, that is, the weight individuals assign to own and others’ outcomes in interdependent situations. Surprisingly, there is only moderate correspondence between these measures, but it is unclear why and what the implications are for identifying individual differences in social value orientation. Using a dataset of 8021 participants from 31 countries and regions, this study revealed that the Slider Measure identified fewer competitors than the Triple Dominance Measure, accounting for approximately one-third of the non-correspondence between the two measures. This is (partially) because many of the Slider items do not afford a competitive option. In items where competition is combined with individualism, competitors tended to make the same choices as individualists. Futhermore, we demonstrated the uniqueness of competitors. Compared to prosocials and individualists, competitors exhibited lower levels of both social mindfulness and trust. Overall, the present work highlights the importance of situational affordances in measuring personality, the benefits of distinguishing between individualists and competitors, and the importance of utilizing a measure that distinguishes between these two proself orientations.

The emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed social behavior across societies and contexts. Here we study whether social norms also changed. Specifically, we study this question for cultural tightness (the degree to which societies generally have strong norms), specific social norms (e.g. stealing, hand washing), and norms about enforcement, using survey data from 30,431 respondents in 43 countries recorded before and in the early stages following the emergence of COVID-19. Using variation in disease intensity, we shed light on the mechanisms predicting changes in social norm measures. We find evidence that, after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, hand washing norms increased while tightness and punishing frequency slightly decreased but observe no evidence for a robust change in most other norms. Thus, at least in the short term, our findings suggest that cultures are largely stable to pandemic threats except in those norms, hand washing in this case, that are perceived to be directly relevant to dealing with the collective threat.

In the literature, human values are defined as desirable, trans-situational goals serving as guiding principles in people's lives. Schwartz introduced the concept of ten different values that are grouped into four higher order values: openness to change, conservation, self-transcendence, and self-enhancement. Some of the Schwartz values will underlie acting for one's own good, the others for the good of the community. The collective output of the community will depend on these two types of actions and the relations between them. Acting for the benefit of others may, yet does not have to, increase the total benefit for the community, even when it leads to less benefit to the self. In this paper we provide an analogy for the mechanisms underlying the relation between Schwartz values and economic output. The observed economic output is a result of the behaviour of many heterogeneous agents interacting with each other. The main problem is to verify whether and how the differences in the distributions of Schwartz values in a given community may influence its collective economic output. We classify Schwartz values into two different groups, based on the different effects these values may have on the observed collective output. A higher importance of self-enhancement (power, achievement, and hedonism) and conservation (security, tradition, and conformity) increases working time in the public sector and the public goods return, while simultaneously lowering working time in the private sector and the private goods return. The values of openness to change (stimulation and self-direction) and self-transcendence (universalism and benevolence) have the opposite effect.

This paper explores patterns and motivations for social tie formation and dissolution in the context of age. It provides empirical tests of the social convoy model, socioemotional selectivity theory, and the differential investment of resources (DIRe) model. Data comes from a survey administered face-to-face to a large, representative sample of the population of Poland (n = 1000). Controlling for between-tie and between-ego differences, it is found that the intensity of forming and dropping new ties is a decreasing function of age, but the relationship becomes weaker among people aged 40 and older. The number of social ties people maintain (degree) is also a decreasing function of age. However, the number of social ties with family, as opposed to coworkers and other acquaintances, is roughly constant across age groups. Young women, but not men, tend to form fewer ties if they are married. Both expressive and instrumental motivations for social tie formation are relatively most active in middle adulthood. The data also reveal a “rich get richer” effect: people with relatively high degree and a more central position in a social network tend to form more new ties and enlarge their social network over time.

Trust and willingness to cooperate depend on the structure of one’s social network and the resources one can access through it. In this study, based on a survey dataset of a representative sample of the Polish population (n = 1000) we create an empirical ‘map’ of four distinct dimensions of social capital: degree (number of social ties), centrality in the social network, bridging social capital (ties with dissimilar others), and bonding social capital (ties with similar others, primarily with kin). We investigate the links between social capital and its key correlates: generalized and particularized trust and willingness to cooperate. We find that centrality (or occupying the position of a network bridge) is positively related to trust, whereas for bonding social capital this relation is negative. We find also a puzzling effect of cooperation without trust in the case of individuals with high bridging social capital resources (ties with dissimilar others).