Social Norm Violation

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 strange. 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 table service would have come across as being even stranger. I felt slightly guilty for not having cleaned up after myself at the coffee shop, but I would have felt very embarrassed to try the alternative exercise in a restaurant wish table service where I tried to clean my own table.
One thing I did consider at the coffee shop was how “norm obedience sometimes vanishes quickly in the absence of a credible punishment threat, (Spitzer, Fischbacher, Hermberger, et al, 2007). There is no credible punishment for leaving dirty dishes on the table, other than the fact that the staff might remember you and not be as friendly the next time you come in. Yet when I noticed the other patron also leaving dirty dishes on the table, I wondered if the only reason people comply with the policy is because other people around them are complying. People are only being polite because they do not want to look bad in front of others. This might be why violating norms is sometimes viewed as powerful behavior. In fact, neuroscience shows that norm violators do tend to exhibit Machiavellian traits (Spitzer, Fischbacher, Hermberger, et al. 2007). Likewise, Mu, Kitayama, Han & Gelfand (2015) used electroencephalography to test subjects’ brains during observed norm violations and found a “a culture-general neural marker of detecting norm violations,” (p. 15348). Norm violations are perceived differently in different cultures, and of course, the norms of each culture “are group specific” (Bernhard, Fehr & Fischbacher, 2006, p. 217). Not bussing my table might not play out as well in certain cultural contexts where rule violations are viewed less favorably. On the other hand, my refusal to clean up my table could have been construed of as a symbol of having a high social status in another society.





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.