Beliefs also make social-norm preferences social

Abstract

A growing body of research reveals that various pro-social behaviors result from a desire to follow social norms. Indeed, a recent study by Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2016) introduced the Rule-following (RF) Task and finds that an individual’s willingness to follow rules in the RF Task predicts her pro-social behavior across many experimental settings. We conduct four experimental studies that use the RF Task. We find that an individual’s willingness to follow rules depends on her belief about others’ rule following and not just an individual-level fixed trait for norm compliance. We discuss the implications of our results for our larger understanding of human pro-sociality.