Negative economic shocks and the compliance to social norms

0585237 - NHU-C 2025 RIV US eng J - Journal Article
Bogliacino, F. - Charris, R. - Gómez, Camilo - Montealegre, F.
Negative economic shocks and the compliance to social norms.
Judgment and Decision Making. Roč. 19, March (2024), č. článku e9. ISSN 1930-2975. E-ISSN 1930-2975
Institutional support: Cooperatio-COOP
Keywords : negative economic shocks * social norms * norm compliance
OECD category: Applied Economics, Econometrics
Impact factor: 2.5, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Open access
https://doi.org/10.1017/jdm.2024.1

We study why suffering a negative economic shock, i.e., a significant loss, may trigger a change in other-regarding behavior. We conjecture that people trade off concern for money with a conditional preference to follow social norms and that suffering a shock makes extrinsic motivation more salient, leading to more norm violation. This hypothesis is grounded on the premise that preferences are norm-dependent. We study this question experimentally: after administering losses on the earnings from a real-effort task, we analyze choices in prosocial and antisocial settings. To derive our predictions, we elicit social norms for each context analyzed in the experiments. We find evidence that shock increases deviations from norms.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0353003


Research data: OSF