Norms Across Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Meta-Analysis of Norms Effects in the Theory of Planned Behavior (corrected & updated)
This paper presents a corrected version of a manuscript published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Norms have emerged as a central concept across various fields of psychology. In social psychology, norms have been important to predict intentions and behavior, but cultural variability has not been examined. In cultural psychology, norms have also played a central role in explained cultural differences. In contrast, to date, variability in norm-intention and norm-behavior relationships has not been systematically investigated. Any systematic variability may be challenging to both social and cultural psychology. We re-analyzed effect sizes taken from five previously published meta-analyses using a fixed-effects model and demonstrate that the relative strength of norm-intention and norm-behavior correlations in this sample of previously published studies are systematically higher in less economically developed societies. We also found significant, but weaker, effects for individualism, tightness–looseness and monumentalism vs flexibility. Meanwhile, behavior domain effects also emerged, which suggests that norms are behavior specific. Norms effects systematically vary across previously published studies, implying that more attention is needed to investigate culturally conditioned domain and behavior effects.