Norm Enforcement: Anger, Indignation or Reciprocity?
By Jeffrey P. Carpenter, Peter Hans Matthews. Social Science Research Network, 2012
135 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The enforcement of social norms often requires that unaffected third parties sanction offenders. Given the renewed interest of economists in norms, the literature on third party punishment is surprisingly thin, however. In this paper, we report on the results of an experiment designed to evaluate two distinct explanations for this phenomenon, indignation and group reciprocity. We find evidence in favor of both, with the caveat that the incidence of indignation-driven sanctions is perhaps smaller than earlier studies have hinted. Furthermore, our results suggest that second parties use sanctions to promote conformism while third parties intervene primarily to promote efficiency.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Demography, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/698d0f941ea95b8dbf1dd024f28441bd93c4df82
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Demography
In Safety Research
- Ernesto Reuben
- Astrid Hopfensitz
- Frans van Winden
- Herbert Gintis
- Ernst Fehr
- Simon Gächter
- Urs Fischbacher
- James Konow
Citations in the corpus
- The Bounds of Reason (2014, background): “We then have the following theorem, which is proved in Carpenter et al. (2009):”
- The Focusing and Informational Effects of Norms on Pro-Social Behavior (2009, unknown): “22 Carpenter and Matthews (2005) also find that subjects are well calibrated about the behavior of others.”
- Social ties and coordination on negative reciprocity: The role of affect (2008, background): “14 In this respect, as is argued by Carpenter and Matthews (2005), there is an important difference between anger-induced punishment by the affected individual and indignation-induced punishment by an unaffected third party.”
- The Importance of Emotions for the Effectiveness of Social Punishment (2006, result): “This is in line with research that finds third party punishment to be less severe (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004; Carpenter and Matthews, 2005).”
- Enforcement of contribution norms in public good games with heterogeneous populations (2009, unknown): “28 Our approach is similar to that of Carpenter and Matthews (2009), who elicit norms in public good games with homogeneous groups.”