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Sanctioning norm violations in everyday interaction: A mixed-methods study

Tue, August 11, 2:00 to 3:30pm, TBA

Abstract

Social norms structure everyday life by prescribing appropriate conduct and providing shared criteria for evaluating behavior. While norms are not backed by formal coercive institutions, they persist in part through sanctioning—negative reactions to deviance. Existing research on sanctioning has relied largely on surveys, experiments, and diary methods. Although valuable, these approaches do not permit direct observation of how deviant acts and sanctioning responses unfold in real time. We intervene by examining sanctioning as it is enacted in situ. Drawing on a corpus of video-recorded, naturally occurring interactions among families and friends in Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom, we analyze mundane social situations—weekend breakfasts, board games, and car rides—where norm enforcement is both common and consequential. We exhaustively annotated all instances in which participants communicated disapproval to prompt correction, elicit apology, or secure contrition. This allows us to estimate the frequency of sanctioning across activities and languages and to analyze its interactional organization. Our qualitative analysis identifies two recurrent forms of sanctioning: moralizing and directive. Moralizing sanctions foreground disapproval and are primarily punitive, by mobilizing criticism or ridicule. Directive sanctions, by contrast, prioritize the practical remediation of deviant conduct while backgrounding their punitive character. These forms differ systematically in timing, action design, and transgressor’s responses. Directive sanctions are organized around behavioral alteration and tend to secure immediate correction. Moralizing sanctions, often issued after opportunities for rectification have passed, project responses such as contrition, defense, or resistance and generate more socially fraught sequences. Combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, we examine the temporality, linguistic design, and response patterns of directive and moralizing sanctions across languages, advancing a real-time, interactional account of how normative order is sustained in everyday life.

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