Market relationships.

In one of Israel’s kindergartens, parents sometimes took their children home too late. When this happened, under the contempt of the educators, the parent, embarrassed, took the child, promising that this will not happen again in the future. Of course, this has been repeated, but not too often. Parents understood that their carelessness forces educators to stay at work overtime and deprives them of their right to deserved rest.

One day, the management of the garden, tired of such delays, decided that the distorted views were not enough, and imposed fines for the delay. Under financial pressure, parents will probably stop being late, they thought.

But the opposite happened. After the introduction of fines, the delays not only did not stop, but also intensified. The parents argued: “Well, if we pay for late money, then it is not providence, but market pay.” Unacceptable behavior has become a social norm for parents.

A few weeks later, realizing the uselessness of the measures, fines for delay in kindergarten were canceled. But it was already too late. The rooted social norm that educators should watch children until late (as soon as they were paid for it) did not disappear after the cancellation of fines. In the minds of parents, it was replaced by the norm "they still have to do this, just now it is free." As a result, the delays have increased again.

The psychologist Dan Ariely, who studied this phenomenon, summed up: "When market relations come to replace social norms, the latter go away for a long time, and back they are unlikely to be able to return, even if the market has changed."