Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.

There is a growing consensus that culture influences the perception of facial expressions of emotion. However, relatively few studies have examined whether and how culture shapes the production of emotional facial expressions. Drawing on prior work on cultural differences in communication styles, we tested the prediction that people from the Netherlands (a low-context culture) produce facial expressions that are more distinct across emotions compared to people from China (a high-context culture). Furthermore, we examined whether the degree of distinctiveness varies across posed and spontaneous expressions. Dutch and Chinese participants were instructed to either pose facial expressions of anger and disgust, or to share autobiographical events that elicited spontaneous expressions of anger or disgust. Using a supervised machine learning approach to categorize expressions based on the patterns of activated facial action units, we showed that both posed and spontaneous facial expressions of anger and disgust were more distinct when produced by Dutch compared to Chinese participants. Yet, the distinctiveness of posed and spontaneous expressions differed in their sources. The difference in the distinctiveness of posed expressions appears to be due to a larger array of facial expression prototypes for each emotion in Chinese culture than in Dutch culture. The difference in the distinctiveness of spontaneous expressions, however, appears to reflect the greater similarity of expressions of anger and disgust from the same Chinese individual than from the same Dutch individual. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to cross-cultural emotion communication, including via cultural products.

Every social situation that people encounter in their daily lives comes with a set of unwritten rules about what behavior is considered appropriate or inappropriate. These everyday norms can vary across societies: some societies may have more permissive norms in general or for certain behaviors, or for certain behaviors in specific situations. In a preregistered survey of 25,422 participants across 90 societies, we map societal differences in 150 everyday norms and show that they can be explained by how societies prioritize individualizing moral foundations such as care and liberty versus binding moral foundations such as purity. Specifically, societies with more individualistic morality tend to have more permissive norms in general (greater liberty) and especially for behaviors deemed vulgar (less purity), but they exhibit less permissive norms for behaviors perceived to have negative consequences in specific situations (greater care). By comparing our data with available data collected twenty years ago, we find a global pattern of change toward more permissive norms overall but less permissive norms for the most vulgar and inconsiderate behaviors. This study explains how social norms vary across behaviors, situations, societies, and time.