What was the nature of Vronsky's concern to repay his gambling debt? It was not merely a reciprocal concern with his gambling partner of the moment. It was, rather, a concern to live up to the standards of behavior of the nineteenth-century Russian aristocratic community of which he was a member. If he failed to repay the debt, he would be embarrassed in that community and would lose standing in it, so that his opportunities within that community would be constrained. He faced a norm of exclusion, a norm that required his submission to the group in various ways at the cost, if he did not submit, of being shunned within the group and perhaps even excluded from the group.

DEFINE: Introduces the 'norm of exclusion' — a mechanism through which group standards enforce individual conformity via threat of shunning.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 267