Yes , subjective norms are important , but let ' s not lose sight of cultural differences

It is very encouraging that the authors of this special issue are giving renewed attention to the contribution of social norms to the creation and maintenance of culture. Such a focus has long been called for (Pepitone, 1976), but rarely achieved up to the present. Focusing on norms is one way of recontextualizing social psychology, and another is to make sure in our studies that we sample a full range of social contexts. To date, the great majority of studies of subjective norms have been conducted within single cultural settings, typically within North America or East Asia, and often with student respondents. There is an implicit assumption that subjective norms are either equally important everywhere (Wan, this issue; Gao et al, this issue; Shteynberg, this issue), or else that they are essentially similar but differ in strength across cultures (e.g., Shteynberg et al., 2009; Tam et al., 2012). These studies are an advance on the earlier basic finding that conformity levels vary with culture (Bond & Smith, 1996), because they do measure the postulated causal mechanism directly. However, they leave open conceptual issues as to how best to understand variations in which types of norm might be relevant to a given cultural setting. For instance, a distinction is often made between descriptive or subjective norms on the one hand and prescriptive or injunctive norms on the other hand. This