Beliefs also make social-norm preferences social

Michael McBride and Garret Ridinger

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2021, vol. 191, issue C, 765-784

Abstract: A growing body of research reveals that various pro-social behaviors result from a desire to follow social norms. Indeed, a recent study by Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2016) introduced the Rule-following (RF) Task and finds that an individual’s willingness to follow rules in the RF Task predicts her pro-social behavior across many experimental settings. We conduct four experimental studies that use the RF Task. We find that an individual’s willingness to follow rules depends on her belief about others’ rule following and not just an individual-level fixed trait for norm compliance. We discuss the implications of our results for our larger understanding of human pro-sociality.

Keywords: Norms; Beliefs; Cooperation; Pro-sociality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268121004157
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:191:y:2021:i:c:p:765-784

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2021.09.030

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().