Observing deviant behaviour can lead to ‘norm erosion’, where a norm is no longer seen as relevant and compliance with it is reduced. Previous research argues that social confrontations can mitigate norm erosion. However, this work has not considered the impact of bystanders to confrontations, who might influence the outcome by supporting—or failing to support—the person confronting a social rule breaker. We examine the effect of bystanders' reactions on preventing norm erosion across three experimental studies. We examined how supportive and non-supportive bystander reactions to a confronter impacted the perceived strength of a prosocial norm among participants and their behavioural intentions. We find that when bystanders explicitly supported the confronter against the rule breaker, the norm was perceived as stronger—and sometimes, compliance intentions were higher—than when bystanders did not respond to the confronter. A mini meta-analysis across the three studies reveals that the effect of bystander support on perceived norm strength is large and robust. Our work demonstrates that for the prevention of norm erosion, confrontations benefit greatly from being explicitly supported by bystanders.

中文翻译：

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沉默之声：旁观者支持对抗者在防止规范侵蚀方面的重要性

观察异常行为可能会导致“规范侵蚀”，即规范不再被视为相关，并且对规范的遵守会减少。先前的研究认为，社会对抗可以减轻规范侵蚀。然而，这项工作并没有考虑旁观者对对抗的影响，他们可能会通过支持或不支持对抗社会规则破坏者的人来影响结果。我们通过三项实验研究检验了旁观者反应对防止规范侵蚀的影响。我们研究了旁观者对对抗者的支持和非支持反应如何影响参与者对亲社会规范的感知强度及其行为意图。我们发现，当旁观者明确支持对抗者反对规则破坏者时，与旁观者没有回应对抗者时相比，规范被认为更强，有时，遵守意图更高。对这三项研究进行的小型荟萃分析表明，旁观者支持对感知规范强度的影响是巨大且稳健的。我们的工作表明，为了防止规范受到侵蚀，对抗从旁观者的明确支持中受益匪浅。