Teaching by example and induced beliefs in a model of cultural transmission

Abstract

We augment standard models of cultural transmission with an explicit account of social learning, grounded in the information transmission literature. Youngsters observe the behavioral trait of a role model and form beliefs about the desirability of that trait.Adults have better information about each trait and have a paternalistic attitude toward their children. This makes them reluctant to adopt myopic behavior to avoid setting a negative example to their children. This signaling distortion increases in the influence parents have over their offspring. We extend the model to allow parental influence to depend on the population frequency of each trait and show that cultural complementarity does not imply convergence to a homogeneous population. We find empirical support for a positive relationship between parental influence and propensity to exert self-restraint by looking at alcohol and tobacco consumption.

A theory of esteem based peer pressure

“…Bénabou and Tirole (2006) point out that behavior in the "honor-stigma" model can display strategic complementarity or substitutability. We show that this naturally translates into two possible scenarios, a "keeping up with the Joneses" effect, where better peers increase one's incentive to perform, 3 Optimal signal design often leads to coarse signals, see Harbaugh and Rasmussen (2014). In the case of grading structures, Dubey and Geanakoplos (2010) show that a degree of coarseness is optimal when students play status games (see also Zubrickas, 2015).…”

“…This provides a natural channel for the shape of the peer group distribution to affect signaling incentives and differentiates the setting from environments with continuous actions, where full separation is possible. 3 Another advantage is that these non-convexities map salient features of real world problems in a compelling way. For instance, educational attainments are typically discrete in nature and are marked by events (e.g.…”

The Signaling Value of Punishing Norm-Breakers and Rewarding Norm-Followers

“…Differently from those works, in our setup parental behavior informs children about the behavior they are likely to encounter in the future in the future. This shares similarities with Adriani and Sonderegger (2018), and Kotsidis (2018) [17][18][19]. However, this paper studies the mechanics and the signaling value of punishment versus reward, and is thus very different in focus.…”

“…Hence, as adults, all individuals start off with a clean slate, independently of how they behaved as youngsters. 18 The payoff of a t-period child is as follows:…”

“…Another possibility, mentioned for instance in Bidner and Eswaran (2014)[39], is that the parents of violators may be punished, rather than the violators themselves. We do not explore this here 18. This ensures stationarity of the problem at hand, since the problem an individual faces as an adult is independent of the action he took as a youngster.…”