Behavioral coordination as an individual best-response to punishing role models

Abstract

Behavioral norms vary widely across social groups, in areas as diverse as fashion, table manners, and gender roles. In spite of increasing interactions and mobility across nations, significant differences persist in norms across societies. What sustains these different norms? We demonstrate how behavioral coordination on a particular norm can result through the simple mechanism of individuals selecting rational responses to a social environment where they encounter repeated signals from anonymous members of the group that include both role-model behavior (e.g., behavior in line with the norm) and punishment (e.g., negative material consequences when the individual does not exhibit behavior in line with the norm). We explore the intuitive theoretical logic of this mechanism, and gauge its empirical strength by running experiments in which we construct this type of social environment in groups of various sizes and then manipulate the frequency with which participants in those groups encounter the role-model and punishment signals. Our results illuminate a behavioral mechanism of learning that is intuitively familiar, but has not been explicitly investigated in the literature as a driver of group-wide coordination on economic choices.