Social Norms Of Reciprocity Research Articles

Understanding reactions to deceit

Reactions to discovered deceit have important consequences politically, socially, etc. We present and test the Social Norm Model (SNM) of the tolerance of deceit. By it, observers of lies intuitively put themselves in the position of the liar. From that perspective, their tolerance, ranging from condemnation to acceptance, is determined by how much the social norms of reciprocity and social responsibility are perceived to be upheld or violated overall. Tolerance encourages identification with the liar. Condemnation fosters dis-identification. To test the SNM, 116 participants recounted lies they told and were told to them they felt were justified and others they regretted/condemned. The social impact of the deceit, the obligation for honesty, and other relevant constructs were assessed for each. Analyses support the model. We illustrate the SNM's applied value for understanding public reaction to the lying of politicians.

Variation in Motivational Appeals to Survey Completion: Lessons from a Randomized Experiment with Teachers

Sample attrition increases the risk of statistical bias and hinders the ability to plausibly estimate causal effects when patterns of nonresponse are correlated with key variables of interest. Drawing on leverage-salience theory and other work in the behavioral psychology field, we empirically capture the impact of distinct motivational appeals on the survey response rates of elementary education teachers in a large urban school district in the northeastern United States. During spring 2017, teachers were randomized to receive one of six motivational appeals and were rerandomized to receive a different appeal each subsequent week, conditional on not having completed the survey. We observe the results on four different margins that range in their time intensity (open email and click, start, and complete survey). We find that extrinsic rewards improved teacher response across all four margins, and the social norm of reciprocity substantially improved teacher response along margins of lower time intensity. As researchers continue to conduct multitreatment arm studies and large-scale evaluations that can suffer from serious issues of sample attrition, this work highlights the contribution of message framing in survey response.

Homophily and Social Norms in Experimental Network Formation Games

Field studies of networks have uncovered a preference to befriend people we perceive as similar according to some dimensions of our identity (“homophily”). Lab studies of network formation games have found that adherence to social norms of reciprocity and inequity aversion are also drivers of network choices. No study so far has attempted to investigate the role of both homophily and social norms in a controlled environment. At the beginning of our experiment, each player fills in a personal profile. Each player then views the profile of all other players and expresses a degree of perceived similarity between his/her profile and the profile of the other player. At this point, a repeated network formation game ensues. We find that: (1) potential homophily considerations triggered by the profile rating task did not measurably change the players’ behavior compared to the baseline; (2) reciprocity plays a significant role in the formulation of the players’ strategies, in particular lowering the probability that the player naively best responds to the network observed in the previous period. We speculate that reciprocation of past choices might be a more “available” aid in strategy-formulation than considerations related to the similarity of the other players.

Economic Experiments for Collective Action in the Kyrgyz Republic: Lessons for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

Payments for ecosystem service (PES) schemes have become increasingly popular in attempting to promote ecological stewardship and conservation behaviour through provisioning of economic incentives often as market-inspired transactions. The scholarship and empirical application of PES schemes has tended to focus on contract design and conditionality of payments rather than more fundamentally examining whether incentives do indeed influence behaviour in desired ways. In this paper, a set of incentive framed treatments are introduced to existing collective action institutions promoting common pool resource management in order to explore the effects of incentive provision on the propensity to participate in the maintenance of collectively owned irrigation canals. The experiments take place in the Kyrgyz Republic, characterized by the historic transition of nomadic collective traditions, subsequent Soviet rule, to advances towards democracy, market integration, and the first PES pilot in the country. In the incentive treatments provided, we reveal the close interplay between the framing of incentives, the influence of village leaders mobilizing collective activity and social norms of reciprocity, trust and enforcement in mobilizing collective work. Each framed case study exhibits a unique configuration of individual motivations, group norms and other regarding rationalities, providing critical insight into this new frontier of PES implementation.

Free and Open Source Licences, Software Programmers, and the Social Norm of Reciprocity

Over the past three decades, free and open source software (FOSS) programmers have developed new, innovative and legally binding licences that have in turn enabled the creation of innumerable pieces of everyday software, including Linux, Mozilla Firefox and Open Office. That FOSS has been highly successful in competing with 'closed source software' (e.g. Microsoft Office) is now undeniable, but in noting this success, it is important to examine in detail why this system of FOSS has been so successful. One key reason is the existence of networks or communities of programmers, who are bound together by a key shared social norm of 'reciprocity'. At the same time, these FOSS networks are not unitary – they are highly diverse and there are large divergences of opinion between members regarding which licences are generally preferable: some members favour the flexible 'free' or 'no copyleft' licences, such as BSD and MIT, while other members favour the 'strong open' or 'strong copyleft' licences such as GPL. This paper argues that without both the existence of the shared norm of reciprocity and the diversity of licences, it is unlikely that the innovative legal framework provided by FOSS would have succeeded to the extent that it has.

Trick with treat – Reciprocity increases the willingness to communicate personal data

Information security is a significant challenge for information and communication technologies (ICT). This includes withstanding attempts of social engineering aimed at manipulating people into divulging confidential information. However, many users are lacking awareness of the risks involved. In a field survey that tested reciprocal behavior in social interactions, 1208 participants were asked to reveal their personal password. In line with the social norm of reciprocity, more than one third of the participants were willing to do so when they received a small incentive. Elicitation was even more successful when the incentive was given right before asking for the password. The results, including moderating factors (e.g., age, gender), are discussed in the light of security awareness of ICT users and the mechanisms of psychological persuasion.

Who You Know Matters: Evidence of Fee Discounts for Clients with Well-Connected Audit Committees

Referrals and recommendations from clients are important for audit firms to develop their client portfolios. Client audit committees are one source of those recommendations, particularly when audit committee members hold multiple audit committee memberships. In this study, we measure the connectedness of audit committees to potential audit clients and we examine the effect of this connectedness on audit fees. Based on negotiation theory and the social norm of reciprocity, we expect and find a negative association between an audit client’s connectedness and audit fees. Our results suggest that audit committee connections result in auditors offering first-year discounts of approximately 4.2 and 7.1 percent per connection for non-expert and expert auditors, respectively. We also provide evidence that first-year discounts are provided only to companies with well-connected audit committees and not to the population of audit clients generally. Finally, we find that auditors are able to leverage these audit committee connections into new clients.

Sino-Capitalism: China's Reemergence and the International Political Economy

There is little doubt that China's international reemergence represents one of the most significant events in modern history. As China's political economy gains in importance, its interactions with other major political economies will shape global values, institutions, and policies, thereby restructuring the international political economy. Drawing on theories and concepts in comparative capitalism, the author envisages China's reemergence as generating Sino-capitalism—a capitalist system that is already global in reach but one that differs from Anglo-American capitalism in important respects. Sino-capitalism relies more on informal business networks than legal codes and transparent rules. It also assigns the Chinese state a leading role in fostering and guiding capitalist accumulation. Sino-capitalism, ultimately, espouses less trust in free markets and more trust in unitary state rule and social norms of reciprocity, stability, and hierarchy.After conceptualizing Sino-capitalism's domestic political economy, the author uses the case of China's efforts to internationalize its currency, the yuan or renminbi, to systematically illustrate the multifarious manner in which the domestic logic of Sino-capitalism is expressed at the global level. Rather than presenting a deterministic argument concerning the future international role of China, he argues that China's stance and strategy in the international political economy hew quite closely to Sino-capitalism's hybrid compensatory institutional arrangements on the domestic level: state guidance; flexible and entrepreneurial networks; and global integration. Sino-capitalism therefore represents an emerging system of global capitalism centered on China that is producing a dynamic mix of mutual dependence, symbiosis, competition, and friction with the still dominant Anglo-American model of capitalism.

A Concept Analysis of Social Capital Within a Health Context

This paper aims to clarify the concept of social capital within a health context using Rodgers's (2000) Evolutionary Method. Published literature. The analysis demonstrates that social capital is the intangible assets, including trust, networks, and social norms of reciprocity, possessed by a society within a specific culture. When a unit (individual or a family) increases its sense of community or quality of community participation, this could increase its social capital. The result of this analysis provides a guide for further conceptual and empirical research and clinical practice.

Cooperar por principio

This article analyzes the potential role of moral motivation in collective action. It is suggested that moral motivation works very differently from the social norms of reciprocity that have been studied in behavioral economics. A new utility function, combining the traditional arguments of the literature on collective action and a moral factor, is presented. In moral terms, the agent increases or decreases its utility depending on how much it deviates from the social average level of cooperation. Moral utility may transform the Prisoner’s Dilemma into a game more favourable to cooperation. Finally, some implications from the model are drawn with regard to the crowding out effect and the concept of personal sacrifice.

Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks

In this paper Professor Strahilevitz addresses the question of why individual members of peer-to-peer file-swapping networks such as Napster, Gnutella, and Kazaa consciously choose to share their unlicensed copies of copyrighted content with anonymous strangers despite the absence of economic incentives for doing so. Rational choice theorists and many social psychologists ordinarily expect that in the absence of face-to-face contact or other communication, strangers who expect neither to engage in repeat-player interactions nor to be sanctioned for free-riding will be unlikely to contribute to a public good if such cooperation is somewhat costly. Yet Strahilevitz's study found that a majority of those users who downloaded songs from the MusicCity/Kazaa network shared at least some portions of their music collections with anonymous peers, despite an absence of face-to-face contact and a near absence of other user-to-user communication and repeat-player interactions. Previous research has suggested that many of these users do incur real costs in order to share their content. Strahilevitz attributes this cooperative behavior in part to the file-swapping networks' code. Charismatic code is a technology that presents each member of a group with a distorted picture of his fellow group members by magnifying cooperative behavior and masking uncooperative behavior. Strahilevitz argues that users who are exposed to charismatic code and benefit from other users' contributions to these networks are likely to mimic the cooperative behavior they observe. The social norm of reciprocity can therefore engender surprisingly robust cooperation in environments that are characterized by fleeting interactions among anonymous individuals. Strahilevitz concludes that cooperative uploading is nevertheless the weak link in peer-to-peer file transfers, observing that strategies that magnify the prevalence of free-riding or otherwise diminish users' impulse to upload present attractive possibilities for curtailing copyright infringement on the Internet.

Should Visitation Denial Affect the Obligation to Pay Support?

When parents do not live together, the relationship between their children and the parent with whom they do not primarily live is often difficult to establish or maintain. In some cases those difficulties may be exacerbated by the custodial parent's resistence to regular contact and visitation with the other parent, expressed through conduct that violates the judicial decree setting forth the custody terms. In other cases substantial impairment in the noncustodial parent's relationship with the child may unavoidably result from custodial-parent conduct that is both lawful and reasonable, such as justified relocation with a young child to a distant location to which the other parent cannot follow. At one time the support obligor might have stopped making payments in either situation, effectively undermining the formal legal rule requiring him to pay, but improvements in the enforcement of child support obligations increasingly exclude that form of self-help. Where impairment in the parent-child relationship arises from noncompliance with the visitation provisions of the custody decree, a possible response is its improved enforcement, but inherent difficulties in the available enforcement tools suggest that this response will always leave some cases unresolved. Nor will enforcement address the question in the relocation context. Renewed attention is therefore appropriate to the question of whether formal relief from the child support obligation should be allowed in such cases. The legal doctrine is confused. On one hand the right of access and the obligation of support are both regarded as fundamental attributes of parental status, and typically arise and end together in the context of legal rules establishing or terminating parental status. On the other hand, in many states the law makes clear that one parent's obligation to pay support is not dependent upon the other parent's cooperation in allowing access to the child. The rule that the obligation to pay support and the obligation to permit access are not interdependent is also often surprising to the parents themselves, because it appears to violate the social norm of reciprocity. It survives in the law largely for two reasons, one procedural and one substantive. As a procedural matter parties are supposed to seek modification of an outstanding judicial decree they believe no longer appropriate, rather than ignore it and raise their substantive concerns only later as a defense to an action against them for noncompliance. As a substantive matter, courts assume that the continued payment of child support obligations are essential to the child's welfare, and they are therefore disinclined to reduce or end them as a remedy even if convinced of the custodial parent's improper behavior. This article concludes that while both these procedural and substantive reasons are weighty, they do not, or need not, apply to the full range of cases in which the law denies reductions in the support obligation sought on visitation-denial grounds. The article also considers other reasons for enforcing support, and finds these additional reasons are also often inapplicable to the visitation-denial cases considered here. Carefully distinguishing among cases according to both the severity of the visitation denial, as well as the procedural posture, the article suggests changes in the legal rules that would in many cases satisfy the procedural objection. It also suggests two categories of cases in which the substantive objection will often be of limited relevance: cases involving the enforcement of arrearages where the children are near or beyond the age of majority, and cases in which the support obligee has remarried. It therefore concludes that the increasingly effective enforcement of the support obligation ought to be accompanied by recognition of a visitation-denial ground for reducing, suspending, or terminating it, in select cases. This working paper is a draft of a chapter that will appear in The Law and Economics of Child Support Payments, edited by William Comanor, and expected to appear during 2003.

Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks

In this paper Professor Strahilevitz addresses the question of why individual members of peer-to-peer file-swapping networks such as Napster, Gnutella, and Kazaa consciously choose to share their unlicensed copies of copyrighted content with anonymous strangers despite the absence of economic incentives for doing so. Rational choice theorists and many social psychologists ordinarily expect that in the absence of face-to-face contact or other communication, strangers who expect neither to engage in repeat-player interactions nor to be sanctioned for free-riding will be unlikely to contribute to a public good if such cooperation is somewhat costly. Yet Strahilevitz's study found that a majority of those users who downloaded songs from the MusicCity/Kazaa network shared at least some portions of their music collections with anonymous peers, despite an absence of face-to-face contact and a near absence of other user-to-user communication and repeat-player interactions. Previous research has suggested that many of these users do incur real costs in order to share their content. Strahilevitz attributes this cooperative behavior in part to the file-swapping networks' code. Charismatic code is a technology that presents each member of a group with a distorted picture of his fellow group members by magnifying cooperative behavior and masking uncooperative behavior. Strahilevitz argues that users who are exposed to charismatic code and benefit from other users' contributions to these networks are likely to mimic the cooperative behavior they observe. The social norm of reciprocity can therefore engender surprisingly robust cooperation in environments that are characterized by fleeting interactions among anonymous individuals. Strahilevitz concludes that cooperative uploading is nevertheless the weak link in peer-to-peer file transfers, observing that strategies that magnify the prevalence of free-riding or otherwise diminish users' impulse to upload present attractive possibilities for curtailing copyright infringement on the Internet.

With a little help from my fans – Extending models of pro-social behaviour to explain supporters’ intentions to buy soccer club shares

In this paper, we develop a framework of pro-social behaviour for understanding and explaining soccer fans’ intentions to buy shares from their club in order to provide assistance in times of financial need. Based on the theory of norms, two alternative versions of the framework are empirically tested. Our results yield support for a mediating role of personal norms in the relationship between social norms and behavioural intentions. In other words, the social norm of reciprocity, as well as the level of individual attachment and the degree of perceived efficacy instigates fans to feel the personal obligation to provide financial support by means of buying soccer club shares. Alternatively, no support for moderating hypotheses was found. Perceived efficacy and individual attachment have no impact on the relationship between obligation and behavioural intentions of soccer fans.