Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Global challenges like the climate crisis and pandemic outbreaks require collective responses that quickly adapt to changing circumstances. Social norms are potential solutions, but only if they are capable of adapting themselves. The pandemic provided a unique opportunity to study processes of norm formation and decay in real-world contexts within short time frames. We tracked empirical and normative expectations about social distancing and empirical and normative expectations of sanctioning from June 2021 to February 2022 to explore how norms and meta norms evolved as the Covid-19 risk decreased and increased. We found that norms and meta norms partially adapt to risk dynamics, although they recover with some delay. This highlights the importance of norm enforcement as soon as risk increases. We therefore tested how willingness to sanction depends on different hypothetical norms. Sanctioning intentions increase if a clear meta norm of sanctioning is in place, but decrease with a clear social norm of distance. In conclusion, social norms evolve spontaneously with changes in risk, but might not be adaptive enough when the lack of meta norms of sanctioning introduce tolerance for norm violations. Moreover, norm nudges can potentially have negative externalities if strengthening the social norm increases tolerance for norm violations. This puts some restrictions on dynamic social norms to guide behaviour under risk.