Testing Local Descriptive Norms and Salience of Enforcement Action: A Field Experiment to Increase Tax Collection

Abstract

The use of behavioral science interventions, and particularly social norms, in tax compliance is a growing industry for scholars and practitioners alike in recent years. However, the causal mechanism of these interventions is unknown, where effects could be explained by a pro-social desire to support one's community, conditional cooperation, desire to conform, or fear of reprisals. We conduct a field experiment in local government taxation in the United Kingdom which tests the effectiveness of a social (descriptive) norm against a control condition and against messages that highlight the enforcement process. The social norm outperforms enforcement salience, suggesting that this explanation, although more powerful than the control, does not fully explain compliance effects. This study further provides evidence that social norm type interventions can be effective at the subnational level, a context where previous work has shown they may produce null effects.

Requiem for a Nudge: Framing Effects in Nudging Honesty

“…We must understand the specific context in which the targeted behavior occurs (see discussion in Gino et al, 2019). In addition, despite a long tradition in social psychology, philosophy, and economic literature showing when, why, and how individuals react and conform to descriptive and normative information of peers (e.g., Deutsch and Gerard, 1955;Cialdini and Trost, 1998;Gino et al, 2009;Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004;Bicchieri, 2006;Schultz et al, 2007;Bicchieri et al, 2019a;Dimant, 2019;van Kleef et al, 2019), science is still working towards a better understanding of how to properly frame norm-nudges, which is a highly debated topic in ongoing research (see discussions in, e.g., Bicchieri and Dimant, 2019;Larkin et al, 2019). It is important to advance our understanding on how to best frame norm-nudges because better framing can serve as a cost-effective way to increase the effectiveness of nudge interventions.…”

Information-based interventions for household water efficiency in England and Wales: evidence, barriers and learning opportunities

“…Third, although robust evidence concerning information provision to influence household behaviour in the UK water sector is scarce, there is growing experimental evidence from other locations, notably the US (Ferrao and Miranda, 2013;Ferraro and Price, 2013), and from other sectors, such as consumer finance (Bertrand et al, 2010), energy (Allcott, 2011) and tax compliance (Larkin et al, 2018). Hence, there are learnings on offer that may be helpful to deal with the challenges mentioned above.…”

Nudging Public Employees Through Descriptive Social Norms in Healthcare Organizations

“…Recent scholarship has demonstrated how social norms predictably influence individual behavior in such domains as enhancing tax compliance (e.g., Coleman, 1996; Hallsworth et al, 2017; Larkin et al, 2019), promoting the conservation of residential energy (e.g., Allcott, 2011; Cialdini and Schultz, 2004; Schultz et al., 2007) and water (Bhanot, 2018), preserving petrified woods (e.g., Cialdini et al, 2006), increasing curbside recycling (e.g., Schultz, 1999), sustaining charitable giving in wills (e.g., Behavioral Insight Team, 2013), nurturing prosocial behavior (Krupka and Weber, 2009), and reducing youth initiation to smoking (e.g., Linkenbach and Wesley Perkins, 2003). However, there is a dearth of research focused on how social norms affect public employee behavior.…”