Norms prescribe how to make decisions in social situations and play a crucial role in sustaining cooperative relationships and coordinating collective action. However, following norms often requires restricting behavior, demanding to curtail selfishness, or suppressing personal goals. This raises the question why people adhere to norms. We review recent theories and empirical findings that aim at explaining why people follow norms even in private, when violations are difficult to detect and are not sanctioned. We discuss theories of norm internalization, social and self-image concerns, and social learning (i.e. preferences conditional on what others do/believe). Finally, we present two behavioral, incentivized tasks that can be used to elicit norms and measure the individual propensity to follow them.

规范规定了如何在社会情况下做出决定，并在维持合作关系和协调集体行动方面发挥关键作用。然而，遵循规范往往需要限制行为、要求减少自私或压制个人目标。这就提出了人们为什么要遵守规范的问题。我们回顾了最近的理论和实证研究结果，旨在解释为什么人们即使在私下也遵守规范，而违规行为难以被发现且不受制裁。我们讨论规范内化、社会和自我形象关注以及社会学习（即偏好取决于他人的行为/信仰）的理论。最后，我们提出了两个行为激励任务，可用于引出规范并衡量个人遵循它们的倾向。