ABSTRACT
Social norms play an important role in both preserving the status quo and fostering change to a more sustainable consumption pattern (see Aasen et al., 2024). The term “social norm” generally refers to informal norms as opposed to formal, codified norms such as legal rules (Bicchieri et al., 2023). Social norms are functional in regulating social life and they especially evolve when individual actions cause negative side-effects for others. In these cases, social norms serve the function of restraining egoistic impulses in favor of collective outcomes. Social norms imply that (certain) people should perform or not perform a specific behavior.
