Experimenting with Social Norms

Experimenting with Social Norms
Author: Jean Ensminger
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2014-10-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610448405

Questions about the origins of human cooperation have long puzzled and divided scientists. Social norms that foster fair-minded behavior, altruism and collective action undergird the foundations of large-scale human societies, but we know little about how these norms develop or spread, or why the intensity and breadth of human cooperation varies among different populations. What is the connection between social norms that encourage fair dealing and economic growth? How are these social norms related to the emergence of centralized institutions? Informed by a pioneering set of cross-cultural data, Experimenting with Social Norms advances our understanding of the evolution of human cooperation and the expansion of complex societies. Editors Jean Ensminger and Joseph Henrich present evidence from an exciting collaboration between anthropologists and economists. Using experimental economics games, researchers examined levels of fairness, cooperation, and norms for punishing those who violate expectations of equality across a diverse swath of societies, from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to a small town in rural Missouri. These experiments tested individuals’ willingness to conduct mutually beneficial transactions with strangers that reap rewards only at the expense of taking a risk on the cooperation of others. The results show a robust relationship between exposure to market economies and social norms that benefit the group over narrow economic self-interest. Levels of fairness and generosity are generally higher among individuals in communities with more integrated markets. Religion also plays a powerful role. Individuals practicing either Islam or Christianity exhibited a stronger sense of fairness, possibly because religions with high moralizing deities, equipped with ample powers to reward and punish, encourage greater prosociality. The size of the settlement also had an impact. People in larger communities were more willing to punish unfairness compared to those in smaller societies. Taken together, the volume supports the hypothesis that social norms evolved over thousands of years to allow strangers in more complex and large settlements to coexist, trade and prosper. Innovative and ambitious, Experimenting with Social Norms synthesizes an unprecedented analysis of social behavior from an immense range of human societies. The fifteen case studies analyzed in this volume, which include field experiments in Africa, South America, New Guinea, Siberia and the United States, are available for free download on the Foundation’s website:www.russellsage.org.

Theory and Experiments on Social Norms and Social Image

Theory and Experiments on Social Norms and Social Image
Author: Vera Te Velde
Publisher:
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring the role of social norms and social image in economic decision-making. A combination of theory and experiments is used to understand how certain social preferences might form, how they influence our individual choices through both internal and external motivation, and how they might aggregate into societal norms when individuals are externally pressured to appear to be doing the right thing. The first chapter examines how individual beliefs, or personal norms, interact with the desire to maintain a positive social image when individuals disagree about what should be done in that situation. This commonly occurs in settings such as partisan politics or when moral norms are in flux. Traditional notions of social norms cannot describe these situations, and there is correspondingly no unambiguously ``good'' action that social pressure can promote. I develop two alternative, psychological game theoretic models that explain how social pressure affects behavior even if individuals do not agree on the norm. One channel is ``approval seeking'', in which individuals want their peers to approve of their actions. Another channel is ``respect seeking'', in which individuals want to be known for strict adherence to their personal norms. Approval seekers pool on one option as social pressure increases, thus creating the illusion of societal consensus. This can potentially leading to destructive posturing, in which damaging norms are perpetuated. Respect seekers, on the other hand, are less hypocritical the more social pressure increases, and are accordingly less willing to compromise. Respect is thus a less likely force to produce a societal consensus norm. These results demonstrate that using social pressure to promote a certain behavior may backfire if it targets the wrong kind of social image. In the second chapter, Ulrike Malmendier, Roberto Weber and I explore the case of the norm of reciprocity, both positive and negative. Reciprocal behavioral has been found to play a significant role in explaining outcomes in many important economic domains. However, despite mounting empirical evidence, economists still struggle to converge on the correct model of the underlying motives. Existing theories posit internal preferences for the welfare of others, inequality aversion, or utility from repaying others' kindness. Recent evidence reveals that `one-sided' acts of kindness, not involving reciprocity, exhibit a large degree of reluctance, with people trying to avoid opportunities to act generously, suggesting that external factors such as social image, self image, or social pressure are important determinants of unilateral sharing. However, this revision of conventional theoretical motives for sharing has had little spillover to `two-sided' reciprocity environments, where one individual responds to the actions of another. We review the literature on reciprocity and point to the relative lack of attention paid to external factors. We then present a novel experiment that explores the importance of internal versus external factors in driving reciprocal behavior. We find that, in a laboratory reciprocity setting (the double-dictator game), failure to account for external motives leads to a significant overestimation of internal motives such as fairness and altruism. We use the experimental data to illustrate the importance of combining reduced-form and structural analyses in disentangling internal and external determinants of pro-social behavior. In the third chapter, Pamela Jakiela, Edward Miguel and I look deeper into the origins of norms. We combine data from a field experiment and a laboratory experiment to measure the causal impact of human capital on respect for earned property rights, a component of social preferences with important implications for economic growth and development. We find that higher academic achievement reduces the willingness of young Kenyan women to appropriate others' labor income, and shifts players toward a 50-50 split norm in the dictator game. This study demonstrates that education may have long-run impacts on social preferences, norms and institutions beyond the human capital directly produced. It also shows that randomized field experiments can be successfully combined with laboratory experiment data to measure causal impacts on individual values, norms, and preferences which cannot be readily captured in survey data.

Factorial Survey Experiments

Factorial Survey Experiments
Author: Katrin Auspurg
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2014-11-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1483324303

Filling a gap in the literature of the field, Factorial Survey Experiments provides researchers with a practical guide to using the factorial survey method to assess respondents’ beliefs about the world, judgment principles, or decision rules through multi-dimensional stimuli (“vignettes”) that resemble real-life decision-making situations. Using insightful examples to illustrate their arguments, authors Katrin Auspurg and Thomas Hinz guide researchers through all relevant steps, including how to set up the factorial experimental design (drawing samples of vignettes and respondents), how to handle the practical challenges that must be mastered when an experimental plan with many different treatments is embedded in a survey format, and how to deal with questions of data analysis. In addition to providing the “how-tos” of designing factorial survey experiments, the authors cover recent developments of similar methods, such as conjoint analyses, choice experiments, and more advanced statistical tools.

Norms in the Wild

Norms in the Wild
Author: Cristina Bicchieri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190622059

Large scale behavioral interventions work in some social contexts, but fail in others. The book explains this phenomenon with diverse personal and social behavioral motives, guided by research in economics, psychology, and international consulting done with UNICEF. The book offers tested tools that mobilize mass media, community groups, and autonomous "first movers" (or trendsetters) to alter harmful collective behaviors.

The Complexity of Social Norms

The Complexity of Social Norms
Author: Maria Xenitidou
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2014-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319053086

This book explores the view that normative behaviour is part of a complex of social mechanisms, processes and narratives that are constantly shifting. From this perspective, norms are not a kind of self-contained social object or fact, but rather an interplay of many things that we label as norms when we ‘take a snapshot’ of them at a particular instant. Further, this book pursues the hypothesis that considering the dynamic aspects of these phenomena sheds new light on them. The sort of issues that this perspective opens to exploration include: Of what is this complex we call a "social norm" composed of? How do new social norms emerge and what kind of circumstances might facilitate such an appearance? How context-specific are the norms and patterns of normative behaviour that arise? How do the cognitive and the social aspects of norms interact over time? How do expectations, beliefs and individual rationality interact with social norm complexes to effect behaviour? How does our social embeddedness relate to social constraint upon behaviour? How might the socio-cognitive complexes that we call norms be usefully researched?

The Social Norms Approach to Preventing School and College Age Substance Abuse

The Social Norms Approach to Preventing School and College Age Substance Abuse
Author: H. Wesley Perkins
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2003-02-24
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 078796459X

The Social Norms Approach to Preventing School and College Age Substance Abuse offers educators, counselors, and clinicians a handbook for understanding and implementing a new and highly successful alternative to traditional methods for preventing substance abuse among young people. The proven "social norms" approach outlined in this book identifies young people's dramatic misperceptions about their peer norms and promotes accurate public reporting of actual positive norms that exist in all student populations. The contributors to this important book are the originators, pioneers, and active proponents of this new approach. Many of them have successfully applied the social norms approach in secondary and higher education settings and as a result have promoted healthier lifestyles among adolescents and young adults across the United States.

Norms and the Study of Language in Social Life

Norms and the Study of Language in Social Life
Author: Janus Mortensen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2022-03-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501511882

Sociolinguistics and the social sciences more generally tend to take an interest in norms as central to social life. The importance of norms is easily discernible in the sociolinguistic canon, for instance in Labov’s definition of the speech community as ‘participation in a set of shared norms’ and Hymes’ concepts of ‘norms of interaction’ and ‘norms of interpretation’. Yet, while the notion of norms may play a central role in sociolinguistic theory, there is little explicit theoretical work around the notion of norms itself within the discipline. Instead, norms tend to be treated as conceptual primes – convenient building blocks, ready-made for sociolinguistic theorizing – rather than theoretical constructs in need of reflexive attention. The aim of this book is to assess and advance current understandings of norms as a theoretical construct and empirical object of research in the study of language in social life. The contributors approach the topic from a range of complementary disciplinary perspectives, including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, EM/CA, socio-cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, to provide a multifaceted view of norms as a central concept in the study of language in social life.