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A busy coffee shop I visit has a self-bussing policy. Most people dutifully clean up after themselves and I do not think I have noticed any time where someone left their dirty dishes behind. For this exercise, i decided to violate the norm by leaving my dirty dishes on the table.
Because I did not want to make a bad impression on the staff of a place I enjoy visiting, I told the barista that I was going to leave without bussing my table. The look on her face told me that I was breaking a social norm simply by telling her this, which added an interesting dimension to the exercise. She seemed puzzled that I would tell her something so directly, for something as frivolous as not putting away a mug and a plate.
However, I wanted to focus on the main norm violation to see if other people in the coffee shop would say something to me if I got up without cleaning the table. When I reached the door, I looked back, and the next person who wanted to take my seat simply took my dirty dishes to the bussing station. Essentially the person had to clean up after me. I felt guilty. Then I noticed something...
Two other people got up to leave, and only one of them cleaned their table. It might have been a coincidence, but I couldn’t help think about the fact that norms are created because we agree to behave certain way. In the coffee shop, the policy exists so that patrons can all enjoy a clean table, without overburdening the already busy staff. Norms are reinforced through verbal censure, shaming, or in extreme cases, legal prosecution. Yet other times, the norm violation is not considered serious enough to matter, as was the case in the coffee shop.
Norms are “standards of behavior that are based on widely held beliefs about how individual group members out to behave in a given situation,” (Bernhard, Fehr & Fischbacher, 2006, p. 217). Because many norms are arbitrary, what is normative in one setting might not be in another. I realized that an even bigger norm violation would have been to bus my own table at a fancy restaurant. Not cleaning up after myself at the coffee shop might come across as lazy, but bussing my own table at a nice restaurant where there is…
References
Bernhard, H., Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. (2006). Group affiliation and altruistic norm enforcement. The American Economic Review 96(2): 217-221.
Mu, Y., Kitayama, S., Han, S. & Gelfand, M.J. (2015). How culture gets embrained. PNAS 112(50): 15348–15353
Spitzer, M., Fischbacher, U., Hermberger, B., et al (2007). The neural signature of social norm compliance. Neuron 56(1): 185-196.
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