Measuring Norm Strength: The Specificity of Fairness Under Meritocracy in Europe

Duong, K. (2026). Measuring norm strength: The specificity of fairness under meritocracy in Europe. Acta Psychologica, 266, 106859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.106859

I’m trained as a junior economist and sociologist, but I don’t really like putting myself in just those boxes. Knowledge doesn’t have clear borders—at least not in the way disciplines suggest. In the survey data I work with, I often deal with questions about opinions and attitudes. These are useful for studying normative concepts, but they come with obvious biases. For example, people with right-wing views often underestimate the level of inequality. That kind of distortion is easy to miss in economics and sociology. To deal with it, I bring in ideas from psychology, especially the notion of a cognitive map.

A cognitive map is basically how people organise things in their minds—what feels close, what feels far apart, and how different ideas relate to each other. You can approximate this using Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). MDS takes people’s judgements about similarity and turns them into a spatial map. If two things are seen as similar, they end up close together; if not, they’re further apart. The useful part is that MDS relies on relative comparisons rather than exact numbers, which helps avoid common response issues like always choosing extreme values.

I use MDS to look at how people perceive similarities between different normative ideas. But the bigger question for me is whether this structure changes with context. For instance, people in Estonia tend to overestimate inequality, while people in the US tend to underestimate it. That points to social norms and cultural embeddedness—things that aren’t usually measured very well in economics or sociology. So I looked into newer versions of MDS, especially Hierarchical MDS, which has been used in areas like music research to compare how instruments are perceived across pieces. I found that this approach can be adapted quite naturally to study social norms.

Take fairness (in terms of distributive justice) as an example. It’s not just one thing—you can break it down into equity, equality, need, and entitlement. These are the items I map. Using a distance matrix, I place them in a cognitive space. What changes across countries isn’t so much the basic structure, but how spread out it is. In some contexts, the map expands, meaning the concepts are more clearly separated. In others, it contracts, meaning they overlap more. So people broadly share similar ideas of fairness, but the clarity between those ideas depends on context.

I call this norm specificity. It’s one aspect of norm strength that hasn’t really been measured properly. People often mix it up with norm consensus, which is about how much people agree with each other, usually captured by how similar their responses are. But these are different things. Consensus is about agreement between people; specificity is about how clearly different concepts are distinguished from each other.

In earlier versions of my paper, I tried to position this within management research, especially organisational justice. That was linked to the idea of cultural tightness and looseness, which I thought could explain why cognitive maps expand or contract across countries. But in practice, these concepts were not as easy to operationalise as I had expected. I submitted the paper to top management journals and received mixed reviews. Some liked the measurement idea, while others were sceptical because the method came from a very different field—musicology. In the end, I couldn’t convince them on that point.

The paper was then transferred to Acta Psychologica, and the response was completely different. The reviewers saw the approach as both new and important for studying social norms, and they didn’t question the method at all—probably because MDS is standard in their field. Instead, they pushed me to connect the work to a broader question: norm strength and stability.

That was both exciting and challenging. I’m not formally trained in psychology, so I had to work through a lot of literature. But the more I read, the clearer it became that the paper was addressing a real gap. At first, I wasn’t even sure which aspect of norm strength I was capturing. That only became clear later, especially after reading work by Cristina Bicchieri, who argues that current ways of measuring norm specificity are flawed and need rethinking. That’s exactly where my approach fits in.

After revising, I sent the paper to a few psychologists and colleagues working on social norms. Some of my claims are quite strong, so I wanted to be sure. Their feedback was very positive. I resubmitted the paper, and just one week later both the editor and reviewers were fully convinced. The paper was accepted.