Eliciting Respect for Social Norms

Abstract

Recent models of prosociality suggest that cooperation in laboratory games may be better understood as resulting from a concern for social norms than from prosocial preferences over outcomes. Underlying this interpretation is the idea that people exhibit heterogeneous respect for shared norms. We elicit individual norm-following propensity by asking subjects to choose from two actions (A or B), where action B is costly. The instructions state “the rule is to do B,” and willingness to incur the cost of B reveals respect for norms. Behavior in this task is correlated with norm-consistent behavior in dictator games, providing support for our interpretation.