Does Social Judgment Diminish Rule Breaking? (original) (raw)
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Social Norms and the Enforcement of Laws
2014
We examine the interplay between social norms and the enforcement of laws. Agents choose a behavior (e.g., tax evasion, production of low-quality products, corruption, harassing behavior, substance abuse, etc.) and then are randomly matched with another agent. There are complementarities in behaviors so that an agent's payoff decreases with the mismatch between her behavior and her partner's, and from overall negative externalities created by the behavior of others. A law is an upper bound (cap) on behavior and a lawbreaker , when detected, pays a fine and has her behavior forced down to the level of the law. Equilibrium law-breaking depends on social norms because detection relies, at least in part, on whistleblowing. Law-abiding agents have an incentive to whistle-blow on a law-breaking partner because this reduces the mismatch with their partners' behaviors as well as the negative externalities. When laws are in conflict with norms and many agents are breaking the law, each agent anticipates little whistle-blowing and is more likely to also break the law. Tighter laws (banning more behaviors) have counteracting effects, reducing behavior among law-abiding individuals but inducing more law-breaking. Greater fines for law-breaking and better public enforcement reduce the number of lawbreakers and behavior among law-abiding agents, but increase levels of law breaking among lawbreakers (who effectively optimize their behavior conditional upon matching with lawbreakers). Within a dynamic version of the model, we show that laws that are in strong conflict with prevailing social norms may backfire, while gradual tightening of laws can be more effective in influencing social norms and behavior.
Social Institutions and Sanctioned Behaviors: A Cross-National Study
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2003
This research considers important social institutions (e.g., the economic system, the level of industrialization, the level of social inequality, and the degree of religiosity) as determinants of individuals' justifications to commit socially sanctioned behaviors. Using factor analyses on data from 32,734 individuals located in 27 nations, we find that regardless of country, all individuals group 23 socially sanctioned behaviors uniformly in three categories, which we term controversial behaviors (e.g., abortion), peccadilloes (e.g., keeping money found), and illegal behaviors (e.g., political assassinations). We used Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to test the country-level effects of the social institutions on individuals' ability to justify these three types of sanctioned behaviors. The results confirm that the social institutions influence individuals' justifications of sanctioned behaviors, above and beyond important individual-level control variables included in the HLM analyses. The economic system (degree of socialism) and the level of industrialization show positive effects on all three types of sanctioned behaviors. Social inequality has a positive effect on illegal behaviors and peccadilloes, but a negative effect on controversial behaviors. Religiosity affects illegal behaviors positively and controversial behaviors negatively with no significant influence on peccadilloes.
The Effect of Prescriptive Norms and Negative Externalities on Bribery Decisions
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017
Corruption is a welfare issue worldwide, but it is difficult to study because of its secret nature. We here did a lab economic experiment on bribery to study different compliance mechanisms through which people might be deterred from corruption. We focused on two elements of norms which people might respond to: information about the function of the norm (to avoid harm to third parties) and information about the prescriptive content of the norm (rights and duties). We show that information about both negative externalities of bribery and prescriptive norms are effective deterrents, and that bribe offers and acceptances are most discouraged with their synergic interaction. We find that participants followed prescriptive information, even when it was inefficient to do so, and implied choosing against their material self-interest (by rejecting a bribe) and not reciprocating bribe offers. Such compliance regardless of costs to the self and to others suggests a rule-based " mindless" process, like a normative heuristic. We conclude by highlighting the relevance of these findings as behavioral insights in the elaboration of strategies to combat corruption and norm transgressions.
Social Norms in Corruption: A Bribery Experiment
2019
This paper analyzes social norms in corruption by exploring whether engagement in bribery induces costly third-party punishment. By introducing third-party punishment in a bribery experiment we disentangle social norms from other non-normative motives ̶ such as retaliation, negative reciprocity ̶ maintained merely by parties involved in corruption. We manipulate two main characteristics of bribery: the private benefits gained by corrupt actors, and the negative externality generated by bribery on passive members of society. We find that third parties punish bribers more often than the bribed, but to a lesser extent. Greater private benefits induce third parties to punish more, whereas greater negative externalities have no impact on punishment choices. We unveil the role of emphatic anger as a microdeterminant of third-party punishment. We find gender differences in punishment behavior, with females being more willing to punish the bribed than males, but to a lesser amount.
Social Norms and the Law: Why Peoples Obey the Law
Review of Law & Economics, 2008
This paper explores the relations between law and social norms and in particular, the case of legal compliance in groups. Specifically, this paper argues that the rule of law is a social norm interfacing the formal institutions of society with the informal ones. As social institutions, norms should also be analyzed at the societal level -a level of analysis that neo-classical economic accounts have failed to address due to fundamental premises of current economic theory. Theories developed in psychology provide a good working framework for social norm analysis in general and of legal compliance (rule of law) in particular. Extant evidence is consistent with the present argument.
Journal of Public Economics, 2009
This paper examines cultural differences in individual-decision making in an experimental corruption game. Higher levels of exposure to corruption in daily life may promote a tolerance of corruption that is reflected in norms of behavior. We explore whether, in environments characterized by lower levels of corruption, there is both a lower propensity to engage in corrupt behavior and a higher propensity to punish corrupt behavior. Based on experiments run in Australia (Melbourne), India (Delhi), Indonesia (Jakarta) and Singapore, we find that there is a greater variation in the propensities to punish corrupt behavior than in the propensities to engage in corrupt behavior across cultures. Consistent with the existing corruption indices, the subjects in India exhibit a higher tolerance of corruption than the subjects in Australia. However, the subjects in Singapore have a higher tolerance of corruption than the subjects in Indonesia. We conjecture that this is due to the nature of the recent institutional changes in these two countries. We also vary our experimental design to examine the impact of a more effective punishment system and the effect of the perceived cost of bribery.
Journal of Business Ethics, 2020
In this study, we reconcile conflicting findings from the extant literature on the impact of tax system parameters on tax noncompliance. We argue that social norms play a role of heuristics facilitating tax payers’ response to the instrumental incentives posed by the systemic parameters, such as tax rate and penalties for evasion, and thus moderate the effect of those parameters on willingness to evade taxes. Relying on a unique survey experiment conducted in fourteen countries of Central-Eastern Europe, we demonstrate two types of a conditioning effect of norms. First, the impact of tax rates on respondents’ propensity for tax evasion is moderated by the perceived norms of the society at large (descriptive norms). In particular, an increasing tax rate lowers the probability of evasion as long as one views “most others” as honest taxpayers, which highlights the importance of equitability (fairness) concerns for tax compliance decisions. In contrast, the impact of punishment is moder...
The effect of social norms on bribe offers
The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 2018
We report a sequential bribery game to disentangle the effect of descriptive social norms and sanctions on bribe offers. Participants who knew that they were interacting with a partner from a group with a majority of corrupt (as opposed to honest) partners offered twice as many bribes. This effect of norms occurred independently of strategic considerations and the possibility of being sanctioned. Indeed, the effect of sanctions was not significant. These findings highlight a causal connection from perceptions of bribery to actual behavior.
Social norms and cultural diversity in the development of third-party punishment
Proceedings of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2020
Human cooperation is probably supported by our tendency to punish selfishness in others. Social norms play an important role in motivating third-party punishment (TPP), and also in explaining societal differences in prosocial behaviour. However, there has been little work directly linking social norms to the development of TPP across societies. In this study, we explored the impact of normative information on the development of TPP in 603 children aged 4–14, across six diverse societies. Children began to perform TPP during middle childhood, and the developmental trajectories of this behaviour were similar across societies. We also found that social norms began to influence the likelihood of performing TPP during middle childhood in some of these societies. Norms specifying the punishment of selfishness were generally more influential than norms specifying the punishment of prosocial behaviour. These findings support the view that TPP of selfishness is important in all societies, and its development is shaped by a shared psychology for responding to normative information. Yet, the results also highlight the important role that children's prior knowledge of local norms may play in explaining societal variation in the development of both TPP and prosociality.