Identifying social norms using coordination games: Spectators vs. stakeholders

DOI

We investigate social norms for dictator game giving using a recently proposed norm-elicitation procedure (Krupka and Weber, 2013). We elicit norms separately from dictator, recipient, and disinterested third party respondents and find that elicited norms are stable and insensitive to the role of the respondent. The results support the use of this procedure as a method for measuring social norms.This network project brings together economists, psychologists, computer and complexity scientists from three leading centres for behavioural social science at Nottingham, Warwick and UEA. This group will lead a research programme with two broad objectives: to develop and test cross-disciplinary models of human behaviour and behaviour change; to draw out their implications for the formulation and evaluation of public policy. Foundational research will focus on three inter-related themes: understanding individual behaviour and behaviour change; understanding social and interactive behaviour; rethinking the foundations of policy analysis. The project will explore implications of the basic science for policy via a series of applied projects connecting naturally with the three themes. These will include: the determinants of consumer credit behaviour; the formation of social values; strategies for evaluation of policies affecting health and safety. The research will integrate theoretical perspectives from multiple disciplines and utilise a wide range of complementary methodologies including: theoretical modeling of individuals, groups and complex systems; conceptual analysis; lab and field experiments; analysis of large data sets. The Network will promote high quality cross-disciplinary research and serve as a policy forum for understanding behaviour and behaviour change.

The focus of our experiment is on the social appropriateness of the actions available to the dictator in this game. We measure social appropriateness using the norm-elicitation task proposed by KW. In this task subjects read a description of the game and then rate whether each action available to the dictator is “very socially inappropriate”, “somewhat socially inappropriate”, “somewhat socially appropriate”, or “very socially appropriate”. At the end of the experiment subjects are randomly paired with another participant. One of the dictator’s possible actions is then randomly selected, and both subjects receive 10 Euros if their appropriateness ratings for the selected action match, and 0 Euros otherwise. The experiment is based on two treatments. In our Spectators treatment, as in KW, we collected social appropriateness ratings from subjects who had not previously participated in the dictator game they were asked to evaluate. We conducted 2 sessions of the Spectators treatment (with 38 subjects in total) and 4 sessions of the Stakeholders treatment (with 76 subjects in total).

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-853005
Metadata Access https://datacatalogue.cessda.eu/oai-pmh/v0/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_ddi25&identifier=16eee3a05671bdc210881a0d0108989df633b367f8bb5c913af890029a3acdd6
Provenance
Creator Sefton, M, University of Nottingham
Publisher UK Data Service
Publication Year 2018
Funding Reference Economic and Social Research Council
Rights Martin Sefton, University of Nottingham; The Data Collection is available to any user without the requirement for registration for download/access.
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Numeric
Discipline Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences
Spatial Coverage Maastricht; United Kingdom; Netherlands