From Extreme to Mainstream: The Erosion of Social Norms
By Leonardo Bursztyn, Georgy Egorov, Stefano Fiorin, Daron Acemoglu, Abhijit Banerjee, Davide Cantoni, Esther Duflo, Benjamin Enke, Raymond J. Fisman, Tarek A. Hassan. The American Economic Review, 2020
246 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social norms, usually persistent, can change quickly when new public information arrives, such as a surprising election outcome. People may become more inclined to express views or take actions previously perceived as stigmatized and may judge others less negatively for doing so. We examine this possibility using two experiments. We first show via revealed preference experiments that Donald Trump’s rise in popularity and eventual victory increased individuals’ willingness to publicly express xenophobic views. We then show that individuals are sanctioned less negatively if they publicly expressed a xenophobic view in an environment where that view is more popular. (JEL D72, D85, Z13)
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Demography, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/315153ba85aa709828af2464dc1b1e8b4dc92d92
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Citations in the corpus
- Misperceptions About Others (2021, background): “…to stigma and social desirability biases that may affect survey responses and find that this is not a primary concern (e.g., Cantoni et al. 2019, Bursztyn et al. 2020c); however, others have found it to be relevant for particular contexts, such as social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19…”
- The Effects of Social Movements: Evidence from #MeToo (2020, unknown): “A recent literature based on theory, as well as information interventions, argues that social norms can "unravel" when individuals start expressing their personal beliefs (Sunstein, 2019; Bursztyn et al., 2020).”
- Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, methodology): “…to study job search (Abebe et al., 2020; Altmann et al., 2018; Belot et al., 2018, 2019; Carranza et al., 2020; Franklin, 2017), social norms (Bursztyn et al., 2020b), educational aspirations (Lergetporer et al., 2018b), schooling decisions (Jensen, 2010), major choice (Bleemer and Zafar,…”