What Will Other People Think?

When I was a child and behaved in a way that was not regarded as quite comme il faut by my mom, she would wring her hands in silent despair and say, “What will other people think?” Living in a small town where almost everyone knew each other, this question remained in the back of my mind for years until I graduated from high school and moved to a bigger city for university. It was during my university years when I made a conscious decision not to care about what other people think of me, as I realized that it had no actual bearing on my life (or at least I thought so). And my mom changed her views over time too—if anyone nowadays advocates for worrying less, be it about health or other people’s opinions, it is her. If only she knew this earlier, she says.

Social norms matter, even if they are random.

Of course, it would be naïve to think that I, or anyone for that matter, could be able to fully escape the pressure of social norms and expected behavior. It is a long-established fact in psychological research that our choices, judgments, and behavior are strongly shaped by social norms: that is, how we perceive other people’s opinions on how we should behave, as well as by the behavior and choices of other people.

In a series of studies published in 2019, Pryor and colleagues showed that people do not just conform to descriptive norms—often defined as what other people do—but also to arbitrary and random social norms, even when they realize that these norms do not reflect others’ actual preferences. Moreover, their research suggested that people have a general desire to conform with the opinion or behavior that is more popular overall, regardless of whether it is more supported by members of their in-groups rather than their out-groups. It seems that everybody wants to be on the winning side.

Don’t-norms seem more influential than do-norms.

Interestingly, a study by Bergquist and Nilsson (2019) further demonstrated that people seem to care more about what other people don’t do rather than what they actually do. For example, if one notices other people using glass bottles for drinking water instead of plastic bottles, they may also feel pressured to use a glass bottle since it seems appropriate to use a reusable product (the do norm). However, people may also think that it is inappropriate to use a plastic bottle as it would indicate their lack of commitment to sustainability and a more ecologically sound lifestyle (the don’t norm). Thus, the perceived don’t norms seem to be more important and influential than the do-norms in guiding people’s choices and behavior.

Some cultures are tighter than others.

The strength of social norms varies greatly across cultures. Adherence to Janteloven (the Law of Jante), for example, is often viewed as a quintessential feature of Nordic mentality, symbolizing humbleness, homogeneity, and prevailing conformity to social norms. When I was teaching cross-cultural psychology at the University of Iceland in the early 2000s, I was struck by how uniform the people were in how they dressed. My observations were later validated by a class discussion, where some Icelandic students jokingly said that, in Iceland, simply wearing the "wrong" pair of jeans would be seen as a crime.

The continuous importance of the Law of Jante may help to explain the surprising finding that Norway, the only Nordic country which participated in a 33-country comparative study of cultural tightness-looseness published in Science in 2011, scored very high on perceived tightness, alongside with South and Southeast nations such as Pakistan, Malaysia, India, and Singapore. Tight cultures have clear and pervasive social norms and severe sanctions for deviant behavior, whereas loose cultures such as Ukraine, Estonia, and Holland, for example, have less order, weaker norms, more openness, and tolerance of deviant behavior. Cultural tightness-looseness is a relatively stable and robust characteristic of culture—people’s perceptions of the strength of social norms do change across time but slowly.

Stronger social norms facilitate cooperation, especially in adverse times.

Tight cultures are also more likely to have autocratic rule, fewer political rights and civil liberties, less open media, and stricter punishments than loose cultures. However, cultural tightness can prove very useful, too, especially in high-risk environments. It has been proposed that cultural variation in tightness-looseness is linked to distal ecological and social threats and that imposing stronger rules and social norms may have helped societies to better coordinate their actions and more effectively manage the risks they have faced throughout history. This assumption was tested and proven in a new experimental study published last week in Nature Communications by Szekely and colleagues; the results show that high risk of collective loss does indeed lead to tighter social norms and increased cooperation.

Cultural tightness-looseness was also associated with countries’ COVID-19 case and mortality rates as of October 2020, with loose nations having nearly five times more cases and nine times more deaths than tight nations. As Gelfand and colleagues (2021) argued, their results suggest that “tightening social norms might confer an evolutionary advantage in times of collective threat,” such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The delicate balance between too much and too little

Overall, both the perceived lack of social norms and feeling that social norms are very restrictive can be detrimental to well-being. The findings of a comparative study of 32 nations by Harrington et al. (2015) showed that both highly permissive and restrictive nations have low levels of happiness and life expectancy, high mortality rates for cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and lower gross domestic product per capita. Thus, it seems that under normal circumstances, a moderate degree of perceived tightness-looseness is optimal for psychosocial and economic well-being—very strict social norms constrain autonomous human choice, whereas excessive freedom undermines social cooperation and enhances people’s feelings of uncertainty and unpredictability. So, perhaps it is not such a bad idea to ask yourself, “What will other people think?” from time to time, as it may promote cooperation and offer us some useful guidance and insight into the social fabric of our communities.