Preference for Normative Information Over Social Information: A Vignette Experiment Testing Content Bias at Three Phases of Transmission

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate norm bias, a novel type of content bias, in cultural transmission. Using online vignettes with 106 participants, we investigated whether participants preferred normative information over social information. Following the method of Stubbersfield et al. (2015), we examined norm bias in three transmission phases: choose-to-receive, encode-and-retrieve, and choose-to-transmit. The results showed that normative bias was preferred over social bias in the choose-to-retrieve and choose-to-transit phases, but not in the encode-and-retrieve phase, suggesting that normative information may be more likely to be transmitted over social information.