Enforcement Of Social Norms Research Articles

Cultural Differences Predict Palliative Care Development Across the United States: The Role of Cultural Tightness and Looseness

Across the United States, some regions demonstrate greater readiness to adopt palliative care than others. This geographic variation in access and utilization may be due to cultural variation in “tightness” and “looseness,” which can be understood as the relative strength and enforcement of social norms and behavioral constraint within a culture. The present study examined the influence of cultural tightness-looseness on access to palliative care (i.e., statewide percentage of hospitals with palliative care programs) across the 50 U.S. states while controlling for demographic covariates. Results of regression analyses demonstrated that states with looser cultures (i.e., less adherence to norms) had better palliative care access (β = .501, p = .012). Additionally, access was better in states with greater proportions of female (β = .455, p = .004) and white, non-Hispanic or Latino/a (β = .359, p = .002) residents. Strategies to improve utilization should consider the influence of culture and the relative strength of existing social norms within the region.

Agricultural Land Rights Confirmation, Clan Network, and Farmers’ Investment in Production and Operation

This study is based on micro-survey data on rural household transfers in China. This study uses a multiple linear regression model (to analyze the relationship between variables), an instrumental variable model (to solve potential endogenous problems), and an intermediary effect model to explore the impact of farmland rights confirmation and clan network on farmers’ investment in production and operation and the relationship between clan network confirmation of farmland rights and farmer household investment. The research shows that: (1) The confirmation of farmland rights in China substantially bolsters farmers’ investments in agricultural production and operation. It serves as a secure foundation for land property rights, elevating farmers’ confidence and significantly contributing to the growth of rural economies and the improvement of farmers’ income levels in the Chinese context. (2) In the Chinese context, the existence of clan networks exerts a discernible adverse influence on farmers’ investment decisions in agricultural production and operation. This is primarily attributable to the restricted flow of information within these networks, the enforcement of stringent social norms, and the prevalence of risk-averse attitudes. These factors collectively act as barriers, dampening farmers’ enthusiasm for investment and impeding effective decision-making. (3) Importantly, the confirmation of agricultural land rights in China serves as a counterbalance to the inhibitory effects of clan networks. It achieves this by mitigating information asymmetry and reducing cooperation risks. This proactive approach not only promotes but also facilitates farmers’ investments in agricultural production and operation within the Chinese context. Consequently, land rights confirmation emerges as a key driver of increased rural investments in China. This study conducts in-depth research on the impact of farmland ownership confirmation and clan networks on farmers’ investment behavior and the mechanism of action, which provides a useful reference for formulating relevant policies, such as increasing the authority of cultivated land, promoting the modernization of clan networks, cultivating modern management capabilities, etc.

Post-Diversity, Precarious Work for All: Unmaking borders to govern labour in the Amazon warehouse

This paper investigates the (un)making of borders as a form of labour governmentality in one of Amazon’s warehouses in Poland. Guided by a critical theory of borders as a form of labour governmentality under global capitalism, we identify organizational practices through which socio-demographic categories traditionally deployed as principles of organizing work (e.g., gender, age, ability) are unmade: the management of deskilled labour through an algorithmic system, the non-selective hiring of workers, the enforcement of social norms of interpersonal respect and a universal system of casualized employment. Together, these practices constitute workers as undifferentiated, interchangeable and equal labour, let them compete with each other under harshly exploitative conditions, and continuously dispose of the least productive among them, keeping all in structural uncertainty. The study contributes to the critical diversity literature by showing a ‘post-diversity’ governmentality that rests on equality, competition and precarization of labour as a whole, rather than segregation and marginalization through an ‘ideal worker’ norm. This labour governmentality operates by eliciting consent from historically subordinated workers and eliminating the advantage of historically relatively privileged ones. Unmaking borders within labour inside the organization, this governmentality at the same time crucially rests on borders outside it.

Strengths of social ties modulate brain computations for third-party punishment

Costly punishment of social norm transgressors by third-parties has been considered as a decisive stage in the evolution of human cooperation. An important facet of social relationship knowledge concerns the strength of the social ties between individuals, as measured by social distance. Yet, it is unclear how the enforcement of social norms is influenced by the social distance between a third-party and a norm violator at the behavioral and the brain system levels. Here, we investigated how social distance between punishers and norm-violators influences third-party punishment. Participants as third-party punished norm violators more severely as social distance between them increased. Using model-based fMRI, we disentangled key computations contributing to third-party punishment: inequity aversion, social distance between participant and norm violator and integration of the cost to punish with these signals. Inequity aversion increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula, and processing social distance engaged a bilateral fronto-parietal cortex brain network. These two brain signals and the cost to punish were integrated in a subjective value signal of sanctions that modulated activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Together, our results reveal the neurocomputational underpinnings of third-party punishment and how social distance modulates enforcement of social norms in humans.

Can the medical educator speak? The next frontier of globalisation research in medical education.

Can the medical educator speak? The next frontier of globalisation research in medical education.

THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD TO PAYMENTS OF A SOCIAL TYPE: FEATURES AND PROBLEMS ENFORCEMENT

Purpose of the study. In this article, the author analyzes the general theoretical and practical problems associated with the enforcement of social norms aimed at paying pensions to children, in particular survivors’ pensions. The author proves that the right to pension provision in case of loss of a breadwinner is the most important constitutional right of citizens, including children, and is a kind of their property rights. The article substantiates the conclusion about the need to highlight the independent status of the child - the social status, the content of which is determined depending on the influence of his individual criteria, namely, age, marital status, health status, etc. the system of legal facts necessary for the emergence of the child’s right to receive social payments.

What determines the willingness to sanction violations of newly introduced social norms: Personality traits or economic preferences? evidence from the COVID-19 crisis

Social norms govern human behavior and usually change slowly over time. While individuals’ willingness to sanction others is decisive for the enforcement of social norms and thus social stability, little is known about individual sanctioning behavior related to newly introduced social norms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have used various tools to rapidly and actively introduce the new norm of wearing a face mask; this offers a unique setting to study the determinants of individuals’ willingness to sanction a cooperation norm. In a nationwide online survey in Germany, we find that higher levels of conscientiousness and neuroticism, but none of the economic preferences (time and risk), are significantly and robustly associated with a higher willingness to sanctioning norm violators. Furthermore, there is a strong relationship between supervisors’ and their subordinates’ willingness to sanction norm violation, and we observe that females have a higher value for the appropriate fine for norm violating behavior than men. Our results shed light on the origins of individual compliance with newly introduced public policy measures that are meant to increase solidarity via the explicit shaping of new cooperation norms.

Socially Appropriate Intervention: A Cross-Country Investigation of Third-Party Norm Enforcement

The enforcement of social norms is considered as a main motivation for third-party intervention. We provide direct evidence for this theory in a cross-country experimental trust game with a sender, a receiver, and a third party who can punish or reward the receiver at own cost. As a novelty we share a norm relevant information – the sender’s expectation – with the third party and manipulate the level of norm uncertainty by having the third party to interact with players from the same country versus from a different country. Our results suggest that third parties respond to the norm relevant information when deciding on the intervention, and more so when they intervene players from a different country. These results support the role of social norms in motivating third-party intervention.

Voter Turnout with Peer Punishment

We introduce a model where social norms of voting participation are strategically chosen by competing political parties and determine voters’ turnout. Social norms must be enforced through costly peer monitoring and punishment. When the cost of enforcement of social norms is low, the larger party is always advantaged. Otherwise, in the spirit of Olson (1965), the smaller party may be advantaged. Our model shares features of the ethical voter model and it delivers novel and empirically relevant comparative statics results. (JEL D72, Z13)

Nudging Enforcers: How Norm Perceptions and Motives for Lying Shape Sanctions

The enforcement of social norms is the fabric of a functioning society. Through the lens of two experiments, we examine how motives for lying and norm perceptions steer enforcement. Our contribution is to investigate the extent to which norm breaches are sanctioned, how norm-nudges affect the observed punishment behavior, and how the enforcement is linked to norm perceptions. Using a representative U.S. sample, Experiment 1 provides robust evidence that norm-enforcement is not only sensitive to the extent of the observed transgression (= size of the lie) but also to its consequences (= whether the lie remedies or creates payoff inequalities). We also find norm enforcers to be sensitive to different norm-nudges that convey social information about actual lying behavior or its social disapproval. To explain the punishment patterns, Experiment 2 examines how norms are perceived across different transgressions and how norm-nudges change these perceptions. We observe a malleability of social norm perceptions: norm nudges are most effective when pre-existing norms are vague. Importantly, we also find that punishment patterns in the first experiment closely follow these norm perceptions. Our findings suggest that norm enforcement can be successfully nudged and thus represent an expedient alternative to standard incentive-based interventions.

PERAN AGEN PERUBAHAN DALAM PENGEMBANGAN MASYARAKAT LOKAL YANG BERKELANJUTAN

This article discusses the importance of social capital as a key indicator of people's ability to engage in sustainable development, because social capital can have a deterring and facilitating effect. Change agents are expected to enable individuals or groups to increase access to other forms of critical capital to overcome obstacles and solve problems. Bonded social capital consists of strong network ties as negative in excess of numbers because it can lead to the enforcement of social norms that inhibit innovative change, and connecting social capital consisting of weak network ties as a benefit that allows actors to make social changes that are critical. Society achieves change through a dynamic mix of bonding and connecting bonds.

"Thou Shalt not Smoke": Religion and smoking in a natural experiment of history.

We provide a new identification strategy to analyse the implications of religious affiliation on unhealthful behaviour by focusing on the link between religiousness and smoking. Our quasi-experimental research design exploits the exogenous dramatic fall in religious affiliation that took place in East Germany after the post-war separation. Our conditional difference-in-differences estimates on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1998–2006 indicate that individuals who are not affiliated to any religious denomination are consistently 13–19 percentage points more likely to smoke than are religious individuals. We interpret our results on the basis of a restraining effect of religious ethics on unhealthy behaviour, confirming the view that religion is a far-reaching vehicle for the enforcement of social norms.

Judgments in a hurry: Time pressure affects how judges assess unfairly shared losses and unfairly shared gains.

Human society has evolved to allow third parties-the court system, parents or other societal arbitrators-to punish norm violators and compensate victims. Few studies explore the effect of stress or time pressure on a third-party judge. Under time pressure, people will likely show a more instinctual reaction or judgment style. We investigated third-party punishment and compensation within the context of unfairly shared losses and gains in a dictator game under time pressure. Our results show that under no time pressure, participants were inclined to punish dictators who unfairly split windfall gains; however, participants chose to compensate victims more than punish the norm-violating dictators in the context of unfairly shared losses. With added time pressure, third-parties were disposed to inflict punishment upon the dictator in both the gain and loss contexts-punishment became the action of choice. Our results shed light on the way observed behavior and stress affect social cognition and decision making in the context of altruistic social interventions and the enforcement of social norms.

Microfinance and the Fight Against Poverty in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Studying both the Congolese and Cameroonian cases, this article shows that beyond some normalisation, microfinance prompts some very distinctive ways of appropriation. The authors wonder about the role of states as “ferrymen” of the word “microfinance”. They question the ability and the freedom of organisations and local authorities to put in place microfinance schemes. In a first section, the paper underlines the normative conception going with the term “microfinance”. In a second and third sections it discusses the circulation of the term and the manufacture of practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon. It comes to the conclusion that despite the eventual enforcement of practices and social norms, microfinance has to acclimatize itself to divergent social, political and even religious practices.

The role of visibility on third party punishment actions for the enforcement of social norms

This paper presents results from a prisoner’s dilemma game experiment with a third party punisher. Third party punishment was frequently observed, in line with previous studies. Despite the prevalence of punishment, having one third party punisher in a group did not make one’s defection materially unbeneficial because of the weak punishment intensity observed. When a third party player’s action choice was made known to another third party player in a different group, however, third party punishment was sufficiently strong to transform the dilemma’s incentive structure into a coordination game, through which cooperation norms can be effectively enforced.

Group size effect and over-punishment in the case of third party enforcement of social norms

One of the important topics in public choice is how people's free-riding behavior could differ by group size in collective action dilemmas. This paper experimentally studies how the strength of third party punishment in a prisoner's dilemma could differ by the number of third parties in a group. Our data indicate that as the number of third party punishers increases in a group, the average punishment intensity per third party punisher decreases. However, the decrease rate is very mild and therefore the size of total punishment in a group substantially increases with an increase in group size. As a result, third party punishment becomes a sufficient deterrent against a player selecting defection in the prisoner's dilemma when the number of third party punishers is sufficiently large. Nevertheless, when there are too many third party punishers in a group, a defector's expected payoff is far lower than that of a cooperator due to strong aggregate punishment, while some cooperators are even hurt through punishment. Therefore, the group incurs a huge efficiency loss. Such over-punishment results from third party punishers’ conditional punishment behaviors: their punishment intensity is positively correlated with their beliefs on the peers’ punitive actions. Some possible ways to coordinate punishment among peers even when group size is very large, thus enabling the efficiency loss to be mitigated, are also discussed in the paper.

The Interaction of Communities, Religion, Governments, and Corruption in the Enforcement of Contracts and Social Norms

We investigate the complementarity between informal communities and formal government enforcement of norms of reciprocation and exchange. We introduce a model in which people exchange informally within their community as well as externally on a market. We show that informal community and formal enforcement are complements: the news that someone was convicted of cheating on the market leads that person to be ostracized by their community, bolstering incentives. Although transactions within a community can be less directly beneficial than those on a wider market, doing some transactions within a community and others on a formal market lowers overall costs of enforcement and is still welfare-enhancing compared to either extreme for a wide range of costs of formal enforcement. We also show that religion can enhance the complementarity between community and formal enforcement, while corruption undermines it. We discuss how community can play an important role in a country's development.

Social Norms for Citizenship

Social Norms for Citizenship Jonathan Baron (bio) INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL NORMS IN CONTEXT A social norm is a principle or rule of behavior, which is maintained among members of a group of people both by trying to follow it and by trying to enforce it upon each other. Both of these effects are contingent on the existence of the norm and on the effort of others to maintain it (Bicchieri 2006). In part because of this contingency, social norms differ from abstract moral principles. And the existence of the contingency gives social norms a kind of stickiness. It is difficult to get them started, because a group must accept them, and, once started, they tend to maintain themselves. Social norms also differ from laws, which are usually enforced by an institution dedicated to enforcement. The enforcement of social norms is dispersed. (But Ostrom 1990 has discussed many intermediate cases in which punitive enforcement of rules is also dispersed.) Social norms are one means for mutual control and influence within groups of people. From a simple economic point of view, control is needed because of externalities, the effects of each person’s choices on others. Social norms encourage positive externalities and discourage negative ones. Other means of influence involve coordination, endorsement of moral principles, or coercion by law. In coordination, someone states a standard or principle, and it immediately becomes to everyone’s individual advantage to comply. An example is “Drive on the right side of the road.” It is of course illegal to drive on the wrong side, but this is for those rare cases where people are too much out of control to do what is in their clear [End Page 229] self-interest, so they should not be driving at all. Another example is “We speak English here,” although this does not always work (since the costs of learning a new language are high). Endorsement of moral principles differs from social-norm endorsement in not being understood as contingent on their general acceptance, although moral norms may in fact be generally accepted, so that the categories of moral and social norms overlap considerably. When overlap occurs, the only way to determine the difference between social and moral norms is to determine what would happen in the absence of general support. Turiel (1983) tested such a distinction by asking two questions: “Is it wrong to do X?” and “Would it still be wrong if everyone thought it was okay?” Even most five-year-old children said that it would still be wrong to push someone out of a swing because you wanted to use it, but it would not be wrong for boys to wear dresses to school if everyone thought it was okay. Turiel called rule about dresses a convention, but the same test could apply to social norms. Moral principles themselves do not come with means of enforcement. But they can be endorsed publicly as a way of creating or strengthening social norms or creating laws. Examples of such historical change have concerned slavery, racial discrimination, and women’s rights. Eventually these historical changes have led to laws, but the social norms are still needed where the laws are not easily applied, and the idea that women are morally equal to men has yet to take hold around the world. Coercion is usually done by a central authority. In principle, and often in fact, coercion can solve problems of externalities by threatening to punish harms and withhold rewards from failure to provide positive externalities. It is efficient to have such a central authority, both because of the benefits of specialization and because, when individuals take punishment into their own hands, they invite retaliation by those who see the punishment as excessive (which it often is), and long-term feuds can escalate over time. Thus, the centralization of the power to punish, as well as the resulting effort to suppress [End Page 230] “second-party punishment” by banning such vigilantism, was one of the advantages of government, and a state, when these came into existence in human history. The advantages were so great that states persisted for centuries, even when the central power was abused, with the “king” or...

Social Norms, Endogenous Sorting and the Culture of Cooperation

Throughout human history, informal sanctions by peers were ubiquitous and played a key role in the enforcement of social norms and the provision of public goods. However, a considerable body of experimental evidence suggests that informal peer sanctions cause large collateral damage and efficiency costs. This raises the question whether peer sanctioning systems exist that avoid these costs and whether other, more centralized, punishment systems are superior and will be preferred by the people. Here, we show that welfare-enhancing peer sanctioning without much need for costly punishment emerges quickly if we introduce two relevant features of social life into the experiment: (i) subjects can migrate across groups with different sanctioning institutions and (ii) they have the chance to achieve consensus about normatively appropriate behavior. The exogenous removal of the norm consensus opportunity reduces the efficiency of peer punishment and renders centralized sanctioning by an elected judge the dominant institution. However, if given the choice, subjects universally reject peer sanctioning without a norm consensus opportunity – an institution that has hitherto dominated research in this field – in favor of peer sanctioning with a norm consensus opportunity or an equally efficient institution with centralized punishment by an elected judge. Migration opportunities and normative consensus building are key to the quick emergence of an efficient culture of universal cooperation because the more prosocial subjects populate the two efficient institutions first, elect prosocial judges (if institutionally possible), and immediately establish a social norm of high cooperation. This norm appears to guide subjects’ cooperation and punishment choices, including the virtually complete removal of antisocial punishment when judges make the sanctioning decision.

The Role of Visibility on Third Party Punishment Actions for the Enforcement of Social Norms

This paper presents results from a prisoner’s dilemma game experiment with a third party punisher. Third party punishment was frequently observed, in line with previous studies. Despite the prevalence of punishment, having one third party punisher in a group did not make one’s defection materially unbeneficial because of the weak punishment intensity observed. When a third party player’s action choice was made known to another third party player in a different group, however, third party punishment was sufficiently strong to transform the dilemma’s incentive structure into a coordination game, through which cooperation norms can be effectively enforced.