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I regularly bike on a five mile path encircling Burke Lake, near my home. Since bikes share the narrow path with pedestrians, I ring a bell as I come behind pedestrians going in the same direction. When there are several of them together, it is safest if they all move to the same side of the path; this gives the most distance between the bike and then nearest pedestrian. Sometimes, however, a group splits, with some of them moving to one side and some moving to the other side. Then I have to slow down more in order to safely move between them.
We can interpret the desired behavior here as following a “group norm”, i.e., a social norm that specifies the behavior of groups, rather than the behavior of individuals. An individual norm might be to move to the side of the path when you hear a bike bell, while a group norm might be to move your group together to one side of the path when you hear a bike bell.
It seems to me that while asians are a minority of the pedestrian groups on my path, they are the majority of the groups who split, moving to both sides of the path. This suggests that asians are less familiar with the concept of a group norm, at least for informal groups like “people walking together on a path.” I asked an asian friend who confirmed this – they couldn’t think of an asian group norm. This seems interesting given that asians are often said to be more “group oriented.” Perhaps they attend more to behaving correctly toward groups, but less to making sure their group behaves correctly.
Group Norms
People bike for exercise. Then they do everything they possibly can to avoid slowing down and speeding up again, which takes more work.
Well, many people (myself included) bike to commute and are not particularly interested in it taking more effort than strictly necessary.
Although I'll grant you that Robin is possibly not commuting right there, with it being circle path and all.
In London, it has always been my experience that there is no consensus about which side of the sidewalk to walk on. People seemed to me to randomly choose a side, which led to near-collisions all the time.
This is probably due to the fact that some half of people there are immigrants conditioned to walk on right side of the sidewalk, whereas the British instinct tells the other half to use the wrong^Wleft side, so both sides got their autopilots confused. I've observed similar behaviour when I lived in Ireland some time ago.
Tangentially, this also reminds me of a factory I'd worked in; most workers where right-side immigrants, so right-side traffic naturally formed on factory floor, but on the doors there were 'this way' and 'no entry' signs placed in the left-side manner.
People would, apparently without much thought, switch sides when approaching the door. With hundreds of people going in both directions on shift changes, I'd been always surprised that there hadn't been any accident there.