The Strength of Social Norms Across Human Groups

Abstract

Social norms are a defining feature of human psychology, yet our understanding of them is still underdeveloped. In this article, we present our own cross-cultural research program on tightness-looseness (TL)—which draws on field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods—to illustrate how going beyond Western borders is critical for understanding social norms’ functions and their multilevel consequences. Cross-cultural research enables us to account for the universal features of norm psychology but also explains the great cultural diversity we see in social norms around the globe.