Talking breaks the pattern. That is what makes it interesting.
If the explanation were simply that everything becomes inappropriate in public, talking should move in the same direction. In the study’s aggregate result, it is the sole exception to the drop associated with peers being present. Conversation usually needs a listener. That is a plausible reading of the exception, not a mechanism separately demonstrated by the experiment.
With managers or professors as the audience, even talking receives a more restrictive rating than it does among peers. The question “is it appropriate?” leaves something essential unsaid: in front of whom?
Source: results, Figure 2 ↗Headphones can mean something different in front of the boss
A higher-ranking observer changes the evaluation even of acts that need not make noise. Listening to headphones has the largest additional drop compared with the peer setting: 1.25 points.
One possible interpretation is that being available to pay attention matters around someone with authority. But the study does not separate prestige from the power to evaluate or sanction you. Professors and managers can have all of these. The data cannot establish each respondent’s motive.
The surprising cultural difference appears when nobody is watching
In societies whose participants gave more weight to avoiding harm and unfairness than to loyalty, authority and purity, the gap between being alone and being observed was larger. The authors show that this came primarily from broader approval of acts when others were absent.
That distinction matters. A larger private-to-public drop can start with greater freedom in private. By itself, it does not establish greater severity in public. The relationship between societies’ values and their ratings is an association, not proof that one causes the other.
Something to notice tomorrow
At your next meeting, consider an ordinary act: eating, resting, laughing. Who would have to enter the room for it to seem less appropriate? What, exactly, has changed for the people present?
The study offers a useful way to ask the question. Before calling someone rude, we can name the setting and the expectation we think they violated. These results describe participants’ judgments; they do not require us to adopt the same rules.
What we know and what we don’t
The study and its limits
Brent Simpson, Kimmo Eriksson and colleagues analysed the observer module of the Global Study of Everyday Norms. Data were collected between July 2023 and May 2024. The paper appeared in American Sociological Review on 27 August 2026.
The analysis includes 25,384 adults who rated at least one scenario in this module. Participants rated appropriateness from 1 to 6. The authors recentered the scale from −2.5 to +2.5. Differences in points are unchanged.
These were convenience samples, not nationally representative population samples. The mean age was 27.3 and 54.9% of participants were students. One society sample had only 16 participants. “90 societies” describes the study’s reach, without guaranteeing equal precision in every country.
The comparisons come from statistical models that account for differences between societies. The numbers here are those reported in the results section. We have not re-estimated the models and do not present a country ranking. The behaviours studied are everyday acts; the finding does not automatically extend to theft, violence or every moral rule.
The 15 behaviours
Arguing, laughing, cursing, kissing, crying, singing, talking, flirting, listening to headphones, reading a newspaper, bargaining, eating, resting, shouting in anger and using a mobile phone.
Read the research
Peer-reviewed article · American Sociological Review · 2026
How Norms Depend on the Presence and Status of Observers ↗Editorial interpretation and graphics adapted from Simpson and colleagues. Article available under CC BY 4.0. CC BY 4.0