Abstract
Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Despite their relevance, how norms shape cooperation among strangers remains insufficiently understood. Influential theories also suggest that the level of threat faced by different societies plays a key role in the strength of the norms that cultures evolve. Still little causal evidence has been collected. Here we deal with this dual challenge using a 30-day collective-risk social dilemma experiment to measure norm change in a controlled setting. We ask whether a looming risk of collective loss increases the strength of cooperative social norms that may avert it. We find that social norms predict cooperation, causally affect behavior, and that higher risk leads to stronger social norms that are more resistant to erosion when the risk changes. Taken together, our results demonstrate the causal effect of social norms in promoting cooperation and their role in making behavior resilient in the face of exogenous change.
Highlights
Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases
We start by testing the association between contribution and social expectations, personal beliefs, and dispositions based on unconditional contributions and expectations
Our results show that high risk of collective loss increases social norm strength, reduces tolerance of deviance, and increases cooperation
Summary
Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases Despite their relevance, how norms shape cooperation among strangers remains insufficiently understood. To test whether social norms change in response to external threats, whether they causally motivate behavior, and how this affects their ability to solve cooperation problems we conducted a 30-day online experiment (n = 286) (Fig. 1). (see Methods for preregistered hypotheses and analysis plan) In this way, we provide an empirical account for how variation in experienced risk leads existing social norms to change and how this affects individuals’ ability to solve collective action problems. We isolate the effect of social norms from individual-level factors that may determine contribution in our setting by measuring subjects’ own beliefs about the appropriate way to behave (personal normative beliefs2,16) that are not conditional on the expectations of others, a range of dispositional traits that plausibly affect contribution and/or sensitivity to social norms (The Big Five[19,20], Social Value Orientation[21], Risk Preferences[22], Autism Spectrum Quotient23,24), and demographic variables (Supplementary Table 1)
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