Rebels with a cause? How norm violations shape dominance, prestige, and influence granting.

Norms play an important role in upholding orderly and well-functioning societies. Indeed, violations of norms can undermine social coordination and stability. Much is known about the antecedents of norm violations, but their social consequences are poorly understood. In particular, it remains unclear when and how norm violators gain or lose influence in groups. Some studies found that norm violators elicit negative responses that curtail their influence in groups, whereas other studies documented positive consequences that enhance violators' influence. We propose that the complex relationship between norm violation and influence can be understood by considering that norm violations differentially shape perceptions of dominance and prestige, which tend to have opposite effects on voluntary influence granting, depending on the type of norm that is violated. We first provide correlational (Study 1) and causal (Study 2) evidence that norm violations are associated with dominance, and norm abidance with prestige. We then examine how dominance, prestige, and resultant influence granting are shaped by whether local group norms and/or global community norms are violated. In Study 3, protagonists who violated global (university) norms but followed local (sorority/fraternity) norms were more strongly endorsed as leaders than protagonists who followed global norms but violated local norms, because the former were perceived not only as high on dominance but also on prestige. In Study 4, popular high-school students were remembered as violating global (school) norms while abiding by local (peer) norms. In Study 5, individuals who violated global (organizational) norms while abiding by local (team) norms were assigned more leadership tasks when global and local norms conflicted (making violators "rebels with a cause") than when norms did not conflict, because the former situation inspired greater prestige. We discuss implications for the social dynamics of norms, hierarchy development, and leader emergence.

Awe Sparks Prosociality in Children.

Rooted in the novel and the mysterious, awe is a common experience in childhood, but research is almost silent with respect to the import of this emotion for children. Awe makes individuals feel small, thereby shifting their attention to the social world. Here, we studied the effects of art-elicited awe on children's prosocial behavior toward an out-group and its unique physiological correlates. In two preregistered studies (Study 1: N = 159, Study 2: N = 353), children between 8 and 13 years old viewed movie clips that elicited awe, joy, or a neutral (control) response. Children who watched the awe-eliciting clip were more likely to spend their time on an effortful task (Study 1) and to donate their experimental earnings (Studies 1 and 2), all toward benefiting refugees. They also exhibited increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia, an index of parasympathetic nervous system activation associated with social engagement. We discuss implications for fostering prosociality by reimagining children's environments to inspire awe at a critical age.