Enriching cultural psychology with research insights on norms and intersubjective representations

Extract: Norms are one of the most important yet least understood processes influencing social behavior.Since the seminal work of Kurt Lewin (1943), social norms have been widely studied in social psychology research, contributing to studies on attitude–behavior relations (e.g., Ajzen, 1991),social influence (e.g., Deutsch & Gerard, 1955), social control (e.g., Ajzen & Madden, 1986;Bandura, 1977), group decision making (e.g., Janis, 1972; Longley & Pruitt, 1980), conformity(e.g., Asch, 1951; Sherif, 1936), and stereotypes (e.g., Schaller & Latané, 1996; Stangor, Sechrist,& Jost, 2001). The goal of this Special Issue is to capture the latest wave of research discoveries on the role of norms in understanding culturally relevant psychological processes (see also Chiu,Gelfand, Yamagishi, Shteynberg, & Wan, 2010; Morris, Hong, Chiu, & Liu, 2015).