The Focusing and Informational Effects of Norms on Pro-Social Behavior

By Erin L. Krupka, Roberto A. Weber. Social Science Research Network, 2009

336 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reports an experiment examining the effect of social norms on pro-social behavior. We test two predictions derived from work in psychology regarding the influence of norms. The first is a "focusing" influence, whereby norms only impact behavior when an individual's attention is drawn to them; and the second is an "informational" influence, whereby a norm exerts a stronger impact on an individual's behavior the more others he observes behaving consistently with that norm. We find support for both effects. Either thinking about or observing the behavior of others produces increased pro-social behavior - even when one expects or observes little pro-social behavior on the part of others - and the degree of pro-social behavior is increasing in the actual and expected pro-social behavior of others. This experiment eliminates strategic influences and thus demonstrates a direct effect of norms on behavior.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e2d5055209ebd500111e4f0b8cc0f4651e60443

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Citations in the corpus

Norm Perception as a Vehicle for Social Change (2016, background): “In this case, the behavior of the observed individual brings the norm into “focus” (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990); their behavior reminds perceivers of the norm and demonstrates that the norm is relevant to the immediate situation or context (see also Krupka & Weber, 2009).”
The Psychology of Environmental Decisions (2014, background): “Both injunctive norms (those about what other people approve or think should be done) and descriptive norms (those about what others actually do) influence decisions to engage in environmentally relevant actions, including littering (108), energy saving (79, 109, 110), recycling (111), and prosocial”
Do people care about social context? Framing effects in dictator games (2012, neutral): “…or to recipient expectations tend to give more on average, even for a given level of anonymity (Bicchieri and Xiao 2009; Ellingsen et al. 2010; Krupka and Weber 2009).11 While some of these findings could be due to actual transmission of information about norms and about other people’s…”
Engineering Information Disclosure: Norm Shaping Designs (2016, background): “Considerable work in psych (e.g. [12, 16]), economics (e.g. [9, 23]) and applied design (e.g. [18, 30]) demonstrated that showing a user what others are doing (or think should be done), leads to conformity in action (or with respect to normative expectations).”
How the interplay between consumer motivations and values influences organic food identity and behavior (2018, background): “Social norms can be conceptualized as jointly-recognized agreements regarding appropriate or inappropriate behavior (Krupka and Weber, 2009).”