Lifting the veil of ignorance: An experiment on the contagiousness of norm violations

Andreas Diekmann, Wojtek Przepiorka and Heiko Rauhut ()
Additional contact information
Heiko Rauhut: Chair of Sociology in particular Modeling and Simulation, ETH Zurich

No 2011004, Discussion Papers from University of Oxford, Nuffield College

Abstract: Norm violations can be contagious. Previous research analyzed two mechanisms of why knowledge about others’ norm violations triggers its spread: (1) Actors lower their subjective beliefs about the probability or severity of punishment, or (2) they condition their compliance on others’ compliance. While earlier field studies could hardly disentangle both effects, we use a laboratory experiment which eliminated any punishment threat. Subjects (n = 466) could commit a violation of the honesty norm. They threw a die and were paid according to their reported number. Our design ruled out any possibility of personal identification so that subjects could lie about their thrown number and claim inflated payoffs without risking detection. The aggregate distribution of reported payoffs allowed determining the extent of liars in the population. Two treatments in which subjects were informed about lying behavior of others were compared to a control condition without information feedback. Distributions from a subsequent dice throw revealed that knowledge about liars triggered the spread of lying compared to the control condition. Our results demonstrate the contagiousness of norm violations, where actors imitate norm violations of others under the exclusion of strategic motives.

Keywords: Social norms; social influence; cheating; lying; experimental sociology; conditional cooperation; Heinrich Popitz (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D83 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2011-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk/documents/DP2011/CESS_DP2011_004.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Lifting the veil of ignorance: An experiment on the contagiousness of norm violations (2015)
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:cex:dpaper:2011004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Oxford, Nuffield College Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wojtek Przepiorka ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).