The emergence of deviance: Experiments testing the personal effects of violating a social norm
Social norms are such powerful drivers of human behavior that people conform to social norms even when they would prefer to violate them or when conforming is not in their personal material interest. Researchers have theorized that in these cases, people conform to avoid the social and psychological costs of deviance (e.g., guilt, self-deprecation, punishment). Notwithstanding the possible costs, people do decide to violate norms. We conducted two randomized experiments (N = 3,499) to explore the behavioral and psychological consequences of deviating from norms. Participants played behavioral games governed by norms of cooperation, without a mechanism for players to punish one another. Participants assigned to the treatment condition, unlike those in the control condition, were offered a monetary incentive to deviate from a strong norm of cooperation in one round of the game. Violating this norm significantly increased their propensity to violate other social norms in new settings involving new groups and new games (with no incentive to deviate). Post-treatment survey data suggest that violating norms causes people to depreciate their expectation of the costs associated with violation, but does not lead them to update their views of the self. Together, these results challenge and inform traditional views of deviance as personality or a stable individual motivation or trait, and suggest that deviance can emerge from an experience of deviance at any point in one's life.