Social norms are enforced by friends: The effect of relationship closeness on bystanders’ tendency to confront perpetrators of uncivil, immoral, and discriminatory behaviors

Abstract

When witnessing an uncivil, immoral, or discriminatory behavior, bystanders have the opportunity to “speak up” and confront the perpetrator about his/her act. We examined whether the closeness of the relationship between the bystander and the perpetrator affects the bystander's reaction. We asked middle schoolers, high schoolers, and university students (N = 1,386) to indicate how they would react if they were to witness each of 26 uncivil, immoral, or discriminatory behaviors. We experimentally manipulated the relationship to the perpetrator, who was described as a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. Results showed that the closer the relationship to the perpetrator the greater the bystander's self‐reported likelihood of “speaking up.” The findings speak to the role of close relationships in the perpetuation of social norms. They also suggest ways to curb anti‐social behaviors in a variety of school and organizational settings.

Modern moral judgments show traces of both ancient and culturally recent sanctioning systems

“…In this task, participants evaluated three possible social acts of sanctioning: contact the police, representing the endorsement of formal sanctions; express his/her disapproval, representing the endorsement of informal sanctions, and say nothing at all, akin to the zero points of blame and punishment in Study 1. We designated the relationship between a transgressor and a norm enforcer as friends because people are likely to impose sanctions on friends but not on strangers (Moisuc & Brauer, 2018). However, it would be ethically questionable to ask participants to imagine that their close friends were engaged in severely bad and illegal violations, such as committing a homicide or an involuntary manslaughter.…”

Digging deeper into responsibility: an investigation of responses to online help-request marketing campaigns in social networking groups

“…Individuals typically expect close friends to be supportive in times of need, Online helprequest marketing campaigns while they are less likely to consider acquaintances as a primary source of assistance. Sharing a consensus on that, HMC recipients who are in a close relationship with requesters will anticipate that social sanctions are more likely to be applied to them (Moisuc and Brauer, 2019). For example, they will expect that their inaction to the help-request will undermine their impression in the requesters' mind and may even incur ostracism from the requesters.…”

Exercising social control in PAYT (Pay-As-You-Throw) violations: The role of subjective evaluations and social capital

“…Available research on the predictors of social control has developed along two distinct pathways. Thus, on the one hand, it has been argued that social control follows from an individual"s subjective appraisal of the behavior -the latter being contingent to a number of factors: the offender"s physical characteristics-such as his/hers gender or posture (Balafoutas and Nikiforakis, 2012;Balafoutas et al,2014;Przepiorka and Berger, 2016); the number of other bystanders witnessing the transgression (Chekroun, 2008;Przepiorka and Berger, 2016); the particularities of the area where the offence occurred (Berger and Hevenstone, 2016); the feelings the particular anti-social behavior elicits in the observer and whether the offender is considered as "one of us" or s/he is closely related to the observer ( (Berger and Hevenstone, 2016;Chekroun, 2008;Moisuc and Brauer, 2019;Nugier et al, 2009); the level of ambiguity surrounding the behavior and the extent to which the observer feels it is legitimate to exercise "social control" over the particular behavior (Chaurand and Brauer, 2008a). Amidst the plethora of these explanatory variables, two have constituted the baseline for this particular analytical tradition, and they have been shown to be positively correlated with social control: "the degree of personal implication" (i.e.to which extent the individual feels that the observed behavior has implications to himself/herself) and the "degree of deviance" of the behavior/action (i.e.…”