A portable method of eliciting respect for social norms

Abstract

Recent models of prosociality suggest that cooperation in laboratory games may be better understood as resulting from concern for social norms than from prosocial preferences over outcomes. Underlying this interpretation is the idea that people exhibit heterogeneous respect for shared norms. We introduce a new, abstract task to elicit a proxy for individual normfollowing propensity by asking subjects to choose from two actions, where one is costly. We instruct subjects that "the rule is" to take the costly action. Their willingness to incur such a cost reveals respect for norms. We show that choices in this task are similar across five countries. Rule-following is correlated with norm-consistent behavior in dictator games, providing support for our interpretation.

Normative Perception of Power Abuse

“…Our design does not allow us to cleanly distinguish which of the two factors, rule-following propensity or beliefs, drives the behavior of the bad punishers. However, the result on the norms elicited in the Dictator game and presented in Figure 4 of Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2018), suggests that there is a connection between being a rule-breaker and believing that behaving selfishly is appropriate. In particular, rule-breakers tend to think that selfishness is more appropriate than rule-followers do.…”

Do norms make preferences social? Supporting evidence from the field

“…rule perception variable might be subject to reverse causality: not complying with the parking rule might lead to a lower rating of how bad one perceives not following the parking rule, since people want to justify their behavior. In addition, Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2018) find that φ i and g(1) are correlated, such that individuals with higher preferences of following rules tend to rate actions which deviate from the norm more inappropriate than individuals with a low preference of following rules. Therefore, it might be hard to measure φ i , and g(1) independently from each other.…”

Experiments in political psychology

“…Participants are explicitly instructed that the rule is to put the balls in Bucket B. Therefore, the task measures willingness to pay a cost to follow an explicit rule, which is interpreted as social norm compliance (Kimbrough & Vostroknutov, 2018). A study using the Rule Following Task found no difference between political liberals and conservatives in rule-following behaviour (Thomsson & Vostroknutov, 2017).…”

“…Fischer et al (2020c) use the Rule Following Task developed by Kimbrough & Vostroknutov (2018) to measure whether social conservatives are willing to forego monetary gains in order to comply with an explicit rule they have been told to follow (see Section 2.2 for details on the task). They find that measures of the social dimension of ideology, such as RWA, support for cultural tightness (Jackson et al, 2019), and security and conformity values (Schwartz et al, 2012), are related to rule-following behaviour (whereas SDO is only weakly negatively related to this).…”