14. What happens normally is the norm:
descriptive and injunctive norms
Expectations of desirable behavior can be put down in writing. For instance most large businesses
and government agencies have a code of conduct stating how managers and employees should
behave. However, in practice other factors, such as the physical environment, determine the
norm. Robert Cialdini and his colleagues also researched this issue.
Once again their experiment involved lyers. This time the subjects were visitors to a hospital.
On returning from a visit the subject found a lyer under the windscreen on the driver’s side
of the car. It was so large that visitors could not really drive away with it in place. On the lyer
was the text: ‘This is automotive safety week. Please drive carefully.’ There was no trash can
nearby. Unnoticed, the researchers registered what the visitor did with the lyer. This time it
was not the lyer text which the researchers varied, but the environment: for half the visitors
the parking lot loor was covered with lyers, sweet wrappers, cigarette butts and paper cups;
for the other half the loor was clean.
In the clean environment, 14 percent of the visitors threw their lyer on the ground, and in
the messy environment the igure more than doubled, to 32 percent. This was not all the
researchers did. What would happen in the parking lot if a passer-by dropped a lyer in full
sight, a few meters from the visitor? In a littered environment the igure for lyers thrown on
the ground rose from 32 to 54 percent. Compared with the clean environment in which the
passer-by did not throw anything on the ground, almost four times as many people threw the
lyer away!
This experiment shows nicely how people read norms from their environment, both directly,
according to what they see others doing (whether a passer-by throws a lyer on the loor), and
indirectly, through the consequences of what others have done (whether the environment is
dirty or clean). According to Cialdini and colleagues, there are both ‘injunctive’ norms, norms
which prescribe the desired behavior, and ‘descriptive’ norms, norms which describe the
current behavior. People are inluenced not only by how things should be, but also how they
are.
14. What happens normally is the norm: descriptive and injunctive norms
