Jonas Paul Schöne | University of Oxford, Harvard Business School

January 19th, 2023

Political segregation is an important social problem, increasing polarization and impeding effective governance. Previous work has viewed the central driver of segregation to be political homophily, the tendency to associate with others who have similar views. Here we propose that, in addition to homophily, people’s social tie decisions are driven by political acrophily, the tendency to associate with others who have more extreme political views (rather than more moderate). We examined this using a paradigm in which participants share emotions and attitudes on political policies, observe others’ responses and choose which others to affiliate with. In four studies (N = 1,235), both liberal and conservative participants’ social tie decisions reflected the presence of acrophily. We found that participants who viewed peers who expressed more extreme views as more prototypical of their political group also tended to engage in greater acrophily. These studies identify a previously overlooked tendency in tie formation. Goldenberg et al. find that people are attracted to social ties who are more politically extreme, rather than moderate. This tendency, called acrophily, is shown to occur when people select ties on the basis of both emotions and attitudes to political issues.

Shaon Lahiri | University of Pennsylvania, The George Washington University

December 8th, 2022

Tobacco use kills more than eight million individuals each year, and results in substantial economic and human capital loss across nations. While effective supply-side solutions to tobacco control exist, these approaches are less effective at promoting cessation among heavy smokers, and less feasible to implement in countries with weaker tobacco control policy environments. Thus, effective demand-side solutions are needed. Shifting social norms around tobacco use is one such promising approach. To this end, a systematic review and meta-analysis of social norms intervention studies to influence tobacco use will be conducted following PRISMA 2020 guidance. Tobacco intervention studies with at least two time points that explicitly mention social norms or social influence as part of an intervention or set of measured variables will be included. Literature sources will comprise PubMed, Scopus, PsycInfo, and the Cochrane Trial Registry, as well as several grey literature sources. Two reviewers will independently screen studies, and risk of bias will be assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias 2 and ROBINS-I tools. The primary outcomes will be change in tobacco use and change in social norms. A random-effects meta-analysis will be conducted for both outcomes. Sources of heterogeneity will be explored using meta-regression with key covariates. Non-reporting biases will be explored using funnel plots.

Sophia Pink | The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania 

November 10th 2022

Scholars, policy makers, and the general public have expressed growing concern about the possibility of large-scale political violence in the United States. Prior research substantiates these worries, as studies reveal that many American partisans support the use of violence against rival partisans. Here, we propose that support for partisan violence is based in part on greatly exaggerated perceptions of rival partisans’ support for violence. We also predict that correcting these inaccurate “metaperceptions” can reduce partisans’ own support for partisan violence. We test these hypotheses in a series of preregistered, nationally representative, correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies (total n = 4,741) collected both before and after the 2020 US presidential election and the 2021 US Capitol attack. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of their rival partisans’ support for violence and willingness to engage in violence were very inaccurate, with estimates ranging from 245 to 442% higher than actual levels. Further, we found that a brief, informational correction of these misperceptions reduced support for violence by 34% (Study 3) and willingness to engage in violence by 44% (Study 4). In the latter study, a follow-up survey revealed that the correction continued to significantly reduce support for violence approximately 1 mo later. Together, these results suggest that support for partisan violence in the United States stems in part from systematic overestimations of rival partisans’ support for violence and that correcting these misperceptions can durably reduce support for partisan violence in the mass public.

Raquel Lorenzo Vidal | Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and Barcelona School of Economics (BSE)

July 28th 2022

Consider an infinite society of agents with social preferences, who make a simultaneous decision. The decision involves a trade-off between meeting the demands of their social environment and their intrinsically preferred option. In equilibrium, agents best-respond to their beliefs. Beliefs are such that others’ morals might be misperceived, but behavior must be correctly forecasted. I identify simple conditions under which agents can disentangle others’ morals from their actions and only one norm (equilibrium outcome) can sustain. One type of condition restricts the set of conjectures (beliefs about others’ best-responses) that people may hold. Another type restricts social preferences. In particular, when social influence is only through others’ actions, there is uniqueness. When these conditions fail, a broad range of social norms can sustain. The multiplicity of social norms does not arise due to coordination problems or signaling motives, as established by previous literature. Instead, it is due to the misperception of others’ morals.

Christoph Oslislo | University of Cologne / iwp

July 14th 2022

Can elections change people’s ideas about what is ethically right and what is wrong? A number of recent observations suggest that social norms can change rapidly as a result of election outcomes. We explore this conjecture using a controlled online experiment. In our experiment, participants rate the social appropriateness of sharing income with poorer individuals. We compare the ratings for situations in which a rule has been elected that asks people to share with ratings when the elected rule asks people not to share. We also compare both situations with ratings in a decision environment in which there is no official rule at all. In the absence of an elected rule, sharing is widely considered socially appropriate, while not sharing is considered socially inappropriate. We show that elections can change this social norm: They shift the modal appropriateness perception of actions and, depending on the elected rule, increase their dispersion, i.e. erode previously existing consensus. As a result, actions previously judged socially inappropriate (not sharing) can become socially appropriate. This power prevails, albeit in a weakened form, even if the election process is flawed (introducing a voting fee or “poll tax”, bribing voters, disenfranchising poorer voters). An additional treatment suggests that both the social information contained in election results and the social appropriateness of following rules per se play a role in shifting social norms.

Woojin Kim | UC Berkeley

Why do we often avoid confronting someone who infringes a social norm? In this online experiment, university students considered whether to send a pressuring email to a campus peer who had yet to register to vote before the 2020 U.S. General Election. This experiment elicits incentivized measures of the participants’ willingness to pay (WTP) to send the email, as well as their beliefs on the persuasiveness and the recipient’s (dis)like of the message. Senders generally believe that their messages will be effective, and they value persuading the recipient to register. But more consequentially, they tend to expect the recipient to dislike the message. Hence on average, senders have a significantly negative WTP and would rather pay instead of sending the email. The sensitivity to the recipient’s dislike of the message, however, is significantly lower when the messages can be sent anonymously. Under a simple framework, I estimate that two-thirds of the motives for (not) sending this normative message come from self-interest, around one-third from the desire to persuade the recipient, and less than ten percent from altruistic concerns.

Flavio Azevedo | Cambridge University

Political ideologies are foundational to a broad range of social science fields such as Political Science, and Social and Political Psychology. Ideologies serve to aid individuals navigate the complex socio-political world by offering an organization of values, justifying social arrangements, and describing power relations. Applied to research, scholars use diverse and wide-ranging approaches to the measurement of an individual’s political ideology. We sought to investigate standard practices by conducting an exhaustive literature review of over 400 scientific articles, spanning from 1930s to 2020s, across social sciences sub-fields. We found and cataloged 358 unique ideological instruments measuring the construct of ‘ideology’. We found a high frequency of incomplete reporting of the items used (37.84%), and substantial variance in scoring and scale type even within identical scales (e.g., in 11.54% was the Wilson & Patterson’s C-Scale (1968) used as suggested by the original authors). Moreover, for novel scales validity evidence was sparingly reported (48.25%), with only a few studies reporting statistical or psychometric technique (58.87%), extraction (25%) or rotation methods (48.39%). Results show that most ideological instruments were either on-the-fly measures (18.16%) or an ad-hoc combination of items (30.17%) present in existing, publicly available surveys. In order to estimate the extent to which operational measures of political ideology overlap regarding item contents, we conducted systematic content analyses of ten ideological scales. Data-driven inductive content analyses revealed 39 ideological topics and a weak mean topic overlap among the ten scales (Jaccard index 0.20). A more theory-driven deductive approach identified 15 topics and a similarly low mean overlap (Jaccard index 0.33). The little to no overlap in approaches to the measurement of ideology suggests that scholars may not be justified in generalizing findings across studies. However, to test this assertion —i.e., whether the routine practice to measure ideology with one ideological instrument but draw conclusions about ideology, in general, relying on the assumption that measures are interchangeable is an invalid approach— we conducted two additional studies (N_total = 3619) assessing the comparability, replicability, and validity of ideological instruments with survey data. We applied five different ideological scales to different established theories in the field and showed empirically that results indeed can change as a function of the instrument used. We conclude that findings in research programs measuring ideology—as well as the perseverance of long-standing debates on polarization, ideology in mass publics, ideological asymmetries, and social and economic ideologies as different psychological paths—are, at least in part, susceptible to the idiosyncratic use of measures of ideology and poor measurement practices in general. We then discuss its consequences and recommendations.

Vicente Valentim | Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow | University of Oxford

Do political preferences translate into behavior? When an individual’s views are stigmatized, they have an incentive to conceal them. This paper provides real-world causal evidence of preference falsification in a democratic setting. My research design leverages within-voting station variation in the observability of vote choices induced by a unique decision by the Spanish electoral commission. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that observability of one’s behavior decreased voting for the right-wing party PP, which is stigmatized in the country. At the individual level, individuals who support the party are more likely to make efforts to keep their vote choice secret. Those who make those efforts also feel more uncomfortable answering surveys on politics. The results highlight the role of social norms as predictors of political behavior, and highlight how seemingly minor changes to the electoral procedure can affect electoral outcomes.

Francesco Capozza | PhD Student | Erasmus University Rotterdam

This paper assesses the impact of a mental health literacy intervention on the demand for mental health support among university students. We run an incentivized survey experiment with 2,978 university students from one of the largest Dutch universities. The literacy intervention provides information on the benefits of are-seeking and its potential returns in terms of academic performance. The intervention increases the willingness-to-pay for a mental health app among male respondents. Moreover, the information increases (decreases) the demand for information about coaching (psychological) services. We document that this substitution is concentrated among students with low to moderate anxiety/depressive symptoms, while the students with severe symptoms increase their demand for coaching without reducing their demand for psychological services. An increased perceived effectiveness of low-intensity therapy is likely to be the mechanism. In a follow-up survey three weeks later, we find that the treated female respondents have improved their mental health. Finally, a model of mental health investment decisions in the presence of (self-)image concerns rationalizes the results.

Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang | PhD Student, MIT Sloan

5th May 2022

Political divisions have become a central feature of modern life. Here, we ask whether these divisions affect performance outside the context of politics. Indeed, in an incentivized non-political news assessment task, we find that subjects are less swayed by (accurate) information that comes from a counter-partisan compared to from a co-partisan. We then adjudicate between two possible mechanisms for this biased advice-taking: a preference-based account, where subjects are motivated to take less advice from counter-partisans because doing so is unpleasant; versus a belief-based account, where subjects sincerely believe co-partisans are more competent at the task (even though this belief is incorrect). To do so, we examine the impact of a 1000-fold increase in the stakes, which should increase accuracy motivations (and thereby reduce the relative impact of partisan motivations). We find that increasing the stakes does not reduce biased advice-taking. We also find that subjects (incorrectly) believe that co-partisans are better at the task, and that this incorrect belief is not reduced by raising the stakes of the belief elicitation. Finally, we find that subjects readily correct their misbelief that co-partisans perform better on the task after being given corrective feedback. These findings support a belief-based, rather than a preference-based, account of politically biased advice-taking, with important implications for understanding partisan bias and improving workplace collaboration.

Access the paper here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3974777

Peter Andre | Postdoc, briq Institute on Behavior & Inequality

21st April 2022

Meritocracies aspire to reward effort and hard work but promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances they were born into. The choice to work hard, however, is often shaped by circumstances. This study investigates whether people’s merit judgments are sensitive to this endogeneity of choice. In a series of incentivized experiments with a large, representative US sample, study participants judge how much money workers deserve for the effort they exert. Unequal circumstances strongly discourage some workers from working hard. Nonetheless, I find that individuals hold disadvantaged workers fully responsible for their choices. They do so, even though they understand that choices are strongly influenced by circumstances. Additional experiments identify the cause of this behavior. In light of an uncertain counterfactual state – what would have happened on a level playing field – individuals base their merit judgments on the only reliable evidence they possess: observed effort levels. I confirm these patterns in a structural model of fairness views and a vignette study with real-world scenarios. Taken together, the findings suggest that the prevailing conception of meritocratic fairness is likely to be “shallow”. People ignore that external circumstances influence the choices that agents make and hold them responsible for these choices. Choices can thereby “launder” unequal circumstances and legitimize the ensuing inequality.

Access the paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tcq5-LwcWoaGXT2efQruzaEGywoK-Kfb/view

Clarissa Mang | University of Munich – LMU Munich

7th April 2022

The adoption of modern health technologies and hygienic practices is often slow, particularly in developing countries. We use a field experiment to measure menstrual hygiene practices and find that social pressure and stigma contribute to the slow adoption of available and affordable modern menstrual health products. We vary participation exogenously in group discussions aimed at “breaking the silence” around menstruation, where participants share their own personal experiences. We find a positive effect on the willingness to pay for modern menstrual products already available on the market (sanitary pads) and on the adoption of a completely new technology (anti-bacterial menstrual underwear). Our results suggest that the underlying causal mechanism is the updating of second-order beliefs about social norms directly related to product take-up, and a reduction in the stigma associated with menstruation.

Erez Yoeli | MIT Sloan

10th March 2022

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported holding normative beliefs in support of COVID-19 containment measures, as well as high rates of adherence to these measures. They also believed that their government and their country’s citizens were not doing enough and underestimated the degree to which others in their country supported strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. Normative beliefs were strongly associated with adherence, as well as beliefs about others’ and the government’s response. Lockdowns were associated with greater optimism about others’ and the government’s response, and improvements in measures of perceived mental well-being; these effects tended to be larger for those with stronger normative beliefs. Our findings highlight how social norms can arise quickly and effectively to support cooperation at a global scale.

Corinna Claus | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

24th February 2022

Using an incentivized online classroom experiment, we assess the effectiveness of deontological vs. consequentialist moral reminders. Participants were told that they are the responsible public servant for acquiring a Covid-19 vaccine, providing them with the opportunity to generate some extra private income by accepting a bribe.

Our findings indicate that a deontological moral reminder (“corruption is immoral”) leads to a significant reduction in accepting bribes. A consequentialist moral reminder, pointing out that bribes are costly to taxpayers, shows no significant effect. Furthermore, we do not find any empirical support that male participants are more corrupt in comparison to female participants. Students majoring in economics or business/management show more corrupt behavior than students studying to become economics school teachers, but the difference is not statistically significant. A person’s disposition towards risk appears to have a strong dissuading effects. Our experiment was conducted before and after the unexpected announcement by pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer on November 9th, 2020, that they will be able to provide an effective Covid-19 vaccine. This announcement does not correlate with a changed level of bribe-taking.

Kati Kish Bar-On | PhD Student, Tel Aviv University

10th February 2022

People’s attitudes towards social norms play a crucial role in understanding group behavior. Norm psychology accounts focus on processes of norm internalization that influence people’s norm following attitudes but pay considerably less attention to social identity and group identification processes. Social identity theory studies group identity but works with a relatively thin and instrumental notion of social norms. We argue that to best understand both sets of phenomena, it is important to integrate the insights of both approaches. Social status, social identity, and social norms are considered separate phenomena in evolutionary accounts. We discuss assumptions and views that support this separation, and suggest an integrated view of our own. We conclude that we should be open to the early origins of human social complexity, and conjecture that the longer the human social world involved multi-level societies the more probable it is that norm psychology and social identity interacted in rich ways.

Tatiana Celadin | Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bologna 

27th January 2022

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2×2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion).

Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).

Linh Vu | PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam

13th January 2022

Decision making is prone to willful ignorance. While deliberate information avoidance is beneficial to the decision maker to maximize self-interest, this behavior can induce adverse consequences to others. What drives willful ignorance, and when are people most likely to engage in this behavior? We present the first meta-analysis on willful ignorance, analyzing 34,007 decisions made by 6,436 participants from 56 different treatments. We provide an overview of all methodologies used to investigate willful ignorance and identify the precise boundaries in which willful ignorance occurs. Results reveal a significant amount of subjects engaging in willful ignorance to obtain the selfish outcome. Further, our findings show willful ignorance depends on both situational factors, such as financial temptation for the decision maker and potential harm for the affected entity, and personal factors, such as the decision maker’s age and gender. We propose the ceiling effect as an explanation for the moderating effect of financial temptation, and we address societal implications for our understanding of who, why and when individuals engage in willful ignorance.

Nina Xue | PhD Student, Monash University

16th December 2021

Literature on punishment and cooperation has presented conflicting findings. While in some settings, punishment crowds out norm compliance and backfires, in others, it communicates norms and promotes cooperation. We examine whether the punisher’s motives can help reconcile the conflicting results through a novel paradigm in which the decision maker’s outcomes are identical in two environments, but vary whether punishment is self-serving (potentially benefits the punisher) or altruistic (potentially benefits a third party). Punishment is more (less) effective when it is motivated by other-regarding (self-interested) concerns and only altruistic punishment increases the social stigma of self-interested behavior.

Elena Giuila Clemente | Pre-Doctoral Research Analyst, Stockholm School of Economics & Swedish House of Finance

2nd December 2021

Scientists and policymakers seek to choose effective interventions that promote preventative health measures. We evaluated whether academics, behavioral science practitioners, and laypeople (N = 1,034) were able to forecast the effectiveness of seven different messages compared to a baseline message for Republicans and Democrats separately. These messages were designed to nudge mask-wearing attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. When examining prediction error across political parties, forecasters predicted larger effects than those observed for Democrats compared to Republicans and made more accurate predictions for Republicans compared to Democrats. These results are partly driven by a lack of nudge effects on Democrats, as reported in Gelfand et al. (2021). Academics and practitioners made more accurate predictions compared to laypeople. Although forecasters’ predictions were correlated with the nudge interventions, all groups overpredicted the observed results. We discuss how accurate forecasts of behavioral intervention outcomes provide insight that can help save resources and increase the efficacy of interventions by updating the accuracy of forecasters’ beliefs.

Dylan Pieper | Research Specialist, University of Maryland

18th November 2021

Many people practiced COVID-19-related safety measures in the first year of the pandemic, but Republicans were less likely to engage in behaviors such as wearing masks or face coverings than Democrats, suggesting radical disparities in health practices split along political fault lines. We developed an “intervention tournament” which aimed to identify the framings that would promote mask wearing among a representative sample of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. (N = 4,931). Seven different conditions reflecting different moral values and factors specific to COVID-19—including protection from harm (self), protection from harm (community), patriotic duty, purity, reviving the economy, threat, and scientific evidence—were implemented to identify which framings would “win” in terms of promoting mask wearing compared to a baseline condition. We found that Republicans had significantly more negative attitudes toward masks, lower intentions to wear them, and were less likely to sign or share pledges on social media than Democrats, which was partially mediated by Republicans, compared to Democrats, perceiving that the threat of COVID-19 was lower. None of our framing conditions significantly affected Republicans’ or Democrats’ attitudes, intentions, or behaviors compared to the baseline condition, illustrating the difficulty in overcoming the strength of political polarization during COVID-19.

Manu Munoz| Postdoctoral Researcher, NYU Abu Dhabi (UAE)

4th November 2021

I study how identity choice can be an instrument of change when members of a minority group are socially excluded by the dominant group for following an inefficient social norm. In this paper I study the problem of identity choice both theoretically and experimentally, looking at the trade-off for minority members between maintaining their inefficient behavior as a unit or adopting the group identity of the majority and joining a more efficient collective. I find that social division is a prominent outcome, in which the minority divides into some that abandon the group’s identity and others that persist on it. Social division has costly consequences not only on those who persist on the inefficient form of behavior. People who change their group identity to integrate with the majority have significantly less chances to succeed when they come from a socially divided minority. When looking at the determinants of social division, I find that groups that have a system of sanctions to prevent their members from leaving are more likely to end up fractured. Thus, policies focused on reducing the barriers to leave inefficient social groups and not only on increasing the benefits of integration may mitigate the costs of social division.

Patrik Michaelsen | Researcher, Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)

21st October 2021

I outline some reasons why we should care more about how people experience and perceive nudge-style behavior change interventions, and give a (very) brief presentation of some empirical findings.

Erik Thulin| Director, Behavioral Science, Center for Behavior & the Environment, Rare (US)

16th September 2021

Individual behaviors are major contributors to climate change, and changing those behaviors can have a major effect on the magnitude of the climate crisis. To best design interventions to change these behaviors, and target those most likely to change, we must understand the psychological motivations for engaging in them. Previous work has identified environmental beliefs, political orientation, and social expectations as having significant effects on performing pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). However, this work has tended to focus on lower impact, commonly performed behaviors. In this exploratory study, we evaluate the relevance of these three constructs on predicting individuals’ intention to perform four behaviors previously identified as some of the highest impact individual actions to mitigate greenhouse gas production: driving an electric vehicle, purchasing carbon offsets, switching to a green energy provider, and installing solar panels. Of those three constructs, we find that only social expectations is a strong consistent predictor of intending to perform these high-impact PEBs. These findings suggest that highlighting others performing these behaviors, rather than framing actions in appeals to climate beliefs or targeting those on the political left, may be a particularly effective intervention strategy to drive individual action to mitigate climate change.

Amanda Gabster | Researcher, Gorgas Memorial Institute for Health Studies (Panama)

26th August 2021

The Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé (CNB), an administratively autonomous Indigenous region in western Panama. This Comarca is home to over 200,000 rural Indigenous peoples of Ngäbe and Buglé ethnicities. HIV prevalence in the Comarca is two times higher than the national average and is concentrated in young men. Gender norms, defined by Cislaghi, et al. as social norms that define acceptable behaviour for women and men, play a role in shaping women and men´s voice and agency and play a role in sexual decision making. Gender norms may be different across different societies. Despite the importance of gender norms and the high prevalence of HIV among youth in the CNB, there are little data regarding gender norms and sexual behaviour among the Ngäbe and Buglé peoples. This presentation focuses on qualitative research undertaken between January and March 2018, among 20 young men and women of the CNB. The presentation describes the findings of young women´s voice and therefore agency in the decision to engage in sex.

Abdelaziz Alsharawy | PhD graduate, Virginia Tech (US)

5th August 2021

The personal experience of events such as financial crises and natural disasters can alter economic preferences. We administered a repeated cross-sectional preference survey during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, collecting three bi-weekly samples from participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The survey elicits economic preferences, self-reported fear of the pandemic, and beliefs about economic and health consequences. Preferences varied over time and across regions, and self-reported fear of the pandemic explains this variation. These findings suggest caution with regard to the generalizability of some types of experimental work during times of heightened fear.

Anna Hochleitner | PhD student, University of Nottingham (UK)

15th July 2021

A large body of literature has shown that social norms can be a powerful driver of human behavior, and norm interventions often focus on shifting beliefs about average or majoritarian behavior. This work addresses a less studied aspect of norms, namely their strength or tightness. We investigate how individuals react to different distributions of co-player behavior within the context of a strategic game — the public good game (PGG) — where subjects strongly condition their actions on those of their opponent. We focus on the difference between tight (i.e., characterized by low behavioral variance) and loose (i.e., characterized by high behavioral variance) norm environments. Our data show that individual responses vary considerably in these two cases, with loose norms generating more variance in individual responses compared to tight norms. In other words, “tight breeds tight” and “loose breeds loose”. What’s more, when confronted with a polarized (U-shaped) distribution of the opponent’s contribution, people’s reactions are also polarized. Finally, we find that, in loose environments, personal values have a stronger predictive power for individual behavior than in the case of tight norms. This shows that it is crucial to consider differences in the strength of norms in order to understand their impact on behavior.

Eugenio Verrina | Postdoctoral Researcher, GATE CNRS (France)

1st July 2021

While social norms have received great attention within economics, little is known about the role of personal norms. We propose a simple utility framework and design a novel two-part experiment to study their relevance across various economic games and settings. We show that personal norms – together with social norms and monetary payoff – are highly predictive of individuals’ behavior. Moreover, they are: i) distinct from social norms across a series of economic contexts, ii) robust to an exogenous increase in the salience of social norms, and iii) complementary to social norms in predicting behavior. Our findings support personal norms as a key driver of economic behavior.

Nina Weber | PhD Student, King’s College London (U.K.)

24th June 2021

People frequently choose to reduce own payoffs to help others. This non-selfish behavior is typically assumed to arise because people are motivated by social preferences. An alternative explanation is that they follow social norms. We test which of these two accounts can better explain subjects’ decisions in a simple distribution game. Unlike previous studies, we elicit preferences and perceived norms directly for each subject. We find that norm-following explains people’s distributive choices better than social preferences, and lack of confidence in one’s social preference predicts norm-following. Our findings have implications for the strength of the Pareto criterion in welfare evaluations.

Amalia Alvarez-Benjumea | Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (Germany)

3rd June 2021

Research has shown that anti-prejudice norms are widespread and generally supported by society, yet examples of prejudice can be found often. I argue that anti-prejudice norms can easily erode when individuals observe examples of norm-violations. As a result, exposure to prejudice speech makes it more likely that individuals will express their prejudice. To test this, participants were invited to take part in a controlled online forum on immigration issues. The comments of participants exposed to xenophobic speech were compared to those not exposed. The empirical results show that observing hateful comments of others erodes own norm-compliance: the more hateful comments participants could observe, the more hateful subsequent comments. Furthermore, the effect is larger amongst those more likely to hold anti-immigrant views. I believe this is evidence of an “emboldening effect”, that is, in the absence of prejudiced speech, prejudiced citizens constrain the expression of their prejudice. However, if xenophobic speech seems to be socially accepted, hidden attitudes are revealed. The results imply that norms can easily erode and that the preservation of a “norm environment” requires sustained reinforcement of the norm.

Erika Kirgios | PhD Student, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (US)

13th May 2021

Receiving help can make or break a career, but women and racial minorities do not always receive the instrumental support they seek. Across two audit experiments—one with politicians and another with students—as well as an online experiment (total N = 5,148), we test whether women and racial minorities benefit from explicitly mentioning their demographic identity in requests for help (e.g., by including statements like “As a Black woman. . . ” in their communications). We propose that when someone highlights their marginalized identity, it activates prospective helpers’ motivations to avoid prejudiced reactions. This ultimately increases prospective helpers’ willingness to provide support. Consistent with this theorizing, when marginalized identity group members explicitly mentioned their demographic identity in help-seeking emails, politicians and students responded 24.4% and 79.6% more often, respectively. Our online experiment suggests this effect is driven by prospective helpers’ increased desire to respond without prejudice.

Nils Köbis | Postdoctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Germany)

22nd April 2021

Large behavioral studies have analyzed individual forms of unethical behavior, like cheating, worldwide. The findings suggest that stark and relatively stable differences between countries concerning unethical behavior exist. Yet, many forms of unethical behavior are transactional and involve multiple parties, like bribery. To gain first behavioral insights that allow comparing the occurrence of bribery across and between countries, we ran large incentivized online experiments using a bribery game with representative samples (in terms of age and gender) from 21 countries (total N = 6472) across six continents. In contrast to previous research, all participants were paired with a participant from each of the other countries, enabling first, comprehensive behavioral insights into cross-national dyadic forms of unethical behavior. The results uncover vast intra-individual variation, suggestive of what we label “conditional bribery” — people offering bribes to interaction partners from countries that are (expected to be) corrupt. Importantly, these beliefs do not correlate with reality.

Sarah Zaccagni | Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)

1st April 2021

Do reminders to promote social distancing achieve the desired effects? Much of the existing literature analyses impacts on people’s intentions to comply. We run a randomised controlled trial in Denmark to test different versions of a reminder to stay home at the beginning of the crisis. Using a two-stage design, we follow up with recipients and analyse their subsequent behaviour. We find that the reminder increases ex-ante intentions to comply when it emphasises the consequences of non-compliance for the subjects themselves and their families, while it has no effect when the emphasis is on other people or the country as a whole. We also find, however, that impacts on intentions do not translate into equivalent impacts on actions. This is despite the possibility that respondents may tend to over-report compliance. Only people in poor health react to the reminder by staying home more. Our results shed light on important gaps between people’s intentions and their actions in responding to the recommendations of health authorities.

Folco Panizza | Postdoctoral Researcher, Vita Salute San Raffaele University (Italy)

11th March 2021

Learning social behaviour of others strongly influences one’s own social attitudes. We compare several distinct explanations of this phenomenon, testing their predictions using computational modelling across four experimental conditions. In the experiment, participants chose repeatedly whether to pay for increasing (prosocial) or decreasing (antisocial) the earnings of an unknown other. Halfway through the task, participants predicted the choices of an extremely prosocial or antisocial agent (either a computer, a single participant, or a group of participants). Our analyses indicate that participants polarise their social attitude mainly due to normative expectations. Specifically, most participants conform to presumed demands by the authority (vertical influence), or because they learn that the observed human agents follow the norm very closely (horizontal influence).

Abraham Aldama | Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania (US)

18th February 2021

Since the 1960s, income inequality has increased in the US. However, taxation on the rich has decreased in the same period. The literature has provided several explanations for why this might be the case. We focus on people’s perception of the extent of inequality. Using a large scale online experiment, we find that providing information about inequality and incentives to overcome cognitive and ideiological biases changes people’s perceptions about the extent of inequality in the US. However, this does not translate into changes in the demand for redistribution through either public or private means. We further find that the lack of change in preferences is not driven by differential responses across across a number of subgroups.

Caroline Graf | PhD student, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands)

4th February 2021

Incentives have surprisingly inconsistent effects when it comes to encouraging people to behave prosocially. That is, the effects of incentives vary across incentive types, private versus public settings and across countries. Previous theoretical accounts have explained these phenomena by postulating an additive effect of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and reputational motivation. We build on these theories, but introduce a key theoretical modification: Reputational motivation depends on social norms. We empirically test our model on the real-world prosocial behavior of blood donation using a comparative dataset comprising representative samples from 28 European countries. We find that social norms can account for the varying effects of financial and time incentives on donation behavior across countries. That is, incentives were associated with higher levels of prosociality when social norms regarding the incentive were more positive. The results indicate that social norms regarding incentives play an important role in determining the effect of incentives on prosocial behavior.