Climbing the ladder or falling from grace? A threat-opportunity framework of the effects of norm violations on social rank

‘Social norms keep anarchy at bay, yet norm violations are omnipresent. Although norm violators are generally rejected from higher-ranking positions, they sometimes rise up the ranks. We advance a threat-opportunity framework to understand how contextual factors shape norm violators’ downward or upward mobility in social hierarchies. The contextual factors we identify pertain to attributes of the actor (violator), the observer, and the cultural...