Norm From The Top: A Social Norm Nudge To Promote Low-Practiced Behaviors Without Boomerang Effect

Abstract

Social norms are an essential determinant of conformity in decision-making, a powerful nudge for helping people adopt prosocial behavior. Informing people that most of their peers behave virtuously encourages them to improve their own behavior. Nevertheless, social norm mechanisms are efficient if the proportion of people who already act prosocially is sufficient, otherwise, the norm can lead to a ”boomerang effect” namely, this induces a person who acts prosocially to abandon her previous choice since she is informed that the majority does not support her prosocial behavior. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new norm that can be efficient even when implemented in behaviors practiced by a minority of people, by contrast to current social norm nudges. In our experiment, we create a new type of feedback that includes descriptive and injunctive norms and then observe whether they are more effective than standard social norm feedback. This new feedback, named ”Norm From The Top”, provides information based on the most altruistic people in the population. The experiment was run online due to the sanitary conditions in 2021. 203 participants were recruited from Cirano (Montreal, Quebec). Cirano is an interuniversity center, multidisciplinary and intersectoral. The sample comprises 120 women and 83 men (Average age = 37.2; SD = 10.5). In the experiment, participants were randomly exposed to a social norm that elicited prosocial behavior from other participants, and we observed whether the group exposed to the Norm From The Top increased their prosocial behavior compared to the other groups. Specifically, participants were asked whether they were willing to complete surveys without compensation. This study found that this norm acted as an effective nudge, increasing the average decision regarding prosocial behavior and addressing the boomerang effect issue. The Norm From The Top sets a high reference point compared to the standard norm and does not induce a reduction of contributions higher than this reference point. In contrast, the standard norm does not have a significant effect due to the boomerang effect and leads to a concentration of the contributions towards the average, resulting in an inefficient nudge in this context. These results show the potential of the Norm From The Top enforcement to promote low-practiced prosocial behaviors, thereby increasing the range of prosocial behaviors that social norm nudges can reinforce. Applying this norm to different types of prosocial behaviors in field experiments would allow for observing its impact on actual behaviors and assessing the external validity of this new instrument before making it available to policymakers.