Pride, Shame and Social Comparisons

Abstract

Social norms play a striking role in shaping behavior, but our understanding of when and why people respect social norms is still limited. A growing literature demonstrates the effectiveness of a social comparison nudge in producing norm-compliant behaviors. We construct a decision-theoretic model and posit that providing information on others’ behavior operates to affect our behavior by activating psychological emotions of pride and shame. Our model is consistent with recent experimental findings in Klinowski (2016).