The role of emotion regulation in normative influence under ambiguity

Social norms are pivotal in guiding decision-making and shaping individuals' choices. Drawing upon meta-analytic evidence and cross-sectional research, we tested the hypothesis that social norms regulate negative emotions within the establish conditional effect of ambiguity. Across three preregistered experiments (ntotal = 2518), we induced ambiguity by both making participants aware of the task complexity and unaware of probabilities. Results confirmed that descriptive social norms are more influential in highly ambiguous situations than those with lower levels of ambiguity in two experiments. Delving into the psychological processes, all three experiments consistently found that being exposed to a descriptive social norm mitigated participants' negative emotions. These results advance past research by suggesting that descriptive norms serve an emotion-regulating function.