Norms Make Preferences Social

Abstract

We explore a unifying explanation for prosocial behavior in which people care not about others' payoffs per se, but whether their own behavior accords with social norms. Individuals who are sensitive to norms will adhere to them so long as they observe others doing the same. A model formalizing this generates both prosociality (without relying on explicit distributional preferences) and well-known context effects (for which simple distributional preferences cannot account). A simple experiment allows us to measure individual-level normsensitivity and to show that norm-sensitivity explains heterogeneity in prosociality in public goods, dictator, ultimatum, and trust games.JEL classifications: C91, C92, D03

The social and ecological determinants of common pool resource sustainability

“…Under CPRH, consistent with the model and findings in Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2013), in which willingness to adhere to social norms of cooperation is conditional on adherence by others, we find that the presence of rule-breakers induces cooperative decay so that mixed-type groups are indistinguishable from rule-breaking groups. Favorable ecological conditions are necessary, but insufficient for successful CPR governance.…”

“…Some might be concerned that the foreknowledge of a second task will influence behavior in the first task. However, as we noted in a previous implementation of a similar experimental design in Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2013):…”

“…Specifically, following Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2013) (hereafter KV), we classify types with an unrelated experimental task in which subjects are asked to follow an arbitrary and costly rule. According to their model, which builds on Kessler and Leider (2012), costly rule-following reveals a disutility of violating social norms.…”

Evaluation of the health impact of an urban regeneration policy: Neighbourhood Renewal in Northern Ireland

“…Some interventions may span different socioecological levels. Interventions that notionally act at the level of the population, such as the changing of social norms, ultimately affect individual behaviours, but for people whose sensitivities to norms are different, the change in norms (its magnitude or ‘dose’) may need to be different 44. Area-based policy by itself may not be sufficient to tackle inequalities and policymakers might consider blended approaches to target the most disadvantaged individuals or groups, while still retaining certain population-wide measures, borne out by recent modelling studies 45–47.…”

For whom does social comparison induce risk-taking?

“…However, these utility specifications are usually calibrated based on games where subjects can only make themselves better off by making other's worse off, such as the dictator or ultimatum game. Recent evidence suggests that behavior in such games is largely determined by dispositional guilt-aversion and reciprocity (Regner and Harth 2010), or social norm following (Kimbrough and Vostroknutov 2013) rather than preferences over outcome distributions per se. In the experiment presented in this paper, subjects cannot in any way affect other subjects' earnings, and thus social norms and guilt aversion should play much less of a role.…”