Social Norms
What are norms? Norms are institutions, and thus, they seem to us extremely solid. You do not expect people to change the way they do business, the way they behave in public, and even, the way they date or mate, you know, within certain limits. But expectations are everything. You follow a norm because you expect other people to follow it. And think what happens if these expectations were to be suddenly and obviously violated. At the beginning, you would feel disoriented, angry maybe, but then, you would probably stop following the norm. So norms that seem so solid are as fragile as our expectations. A change of wind and they are gone. Collected belief, collective expectation is what keeps society together. The greatest social changes, revolutions, for example, were the result of very massive and quite sudden changes in belief, nothing else.