Applying Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments to elicited social norms: Giving and taking in dictator games

Abstract

The main contribution of this paper lies in applying Adam Smith's moral theory to explain how some actions become jointly recognized as socially appropriate while others do not, and how these jointly recognized rules affect actual behavior. To illustrate the strength of Smith's theory, we apply it to the norm-elicitation method by Krupka and Weber (2013) among a representative sample to explain how different elicited social norms vary across “giving” and “taking” contexts in the dictator game.