Norms in the Lab: Inexperienced versus Experienced Participants

DOI

Using coordination games, we study whether social norm perception differs between inexperienced and experienced participants in economic laboratory experiments. We find substantial differences between the two groups, both regarding injunctive and descriptive social norms in the context of participation in lab experiments. By contrast, social norm perception for the context of daily life does not differ between the two groups. We therefore conclude that learning through experience is more important than selection effects for understanding differences between the two groups. We also conduct exploratory analyses on the relation between lab and field norms and find that behaving unsocial in an experiment is considered substantially more appropriate than in daily life. This appears inconsistent with the hypothesis that social preferences measured in lab experiments are inflated and indicates a distinction between revealed social preferences as measured commonly and the elicitation of normatively appropriate behavior.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.11588/data/SS8CBF
Metadata Access https://heidata.uni-heidelberg.de/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.11588/data/SS8CBF
Provenance
Creator Schmidt, Robert (ORCID: 0000-0003-1552-781X)
Publisher heiDATA
Contributor Schmidt, Robert; heiDATA: Heidelberg Research Data Repository
Publication Year 2019
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
OpenAccess true
Contact Schmidt, Robert (Alfred-Weber-Institute for Economics, Heidelberg University)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/pdf; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; text/tab-separated-values; text/plain; application/x-stata-syntax
Size 31304; 31696; 18149; 19574; 52106; 65379; 76499; 164735; 16594
Version 2.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences