2020/10/02 by Steven J Human, Valerio Capraro, Human, Steven J +1
Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social and Intergroup Psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.12081
openalex publication_date 2020/10/02 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We report three pre-registered studies (total N=1,799) exploring the effect of nudging personal and injunctive norms in decisions that involve a trade-off between objective equality and efficiency. The first two studies provide evidence that: (i) nudging the personal norm has a similar effect to nudging the injunctive norm; (ii) when both norms are nudged towards the same direction, there is no additive effect; (iii) when the personal norm and the injunctive norm are nudged towards opposite directions, some people tend to follow the personal norm, while others tend to follow the injunctive norm. Study 3 tests whether these two classes of people, those who tend to follow the injunctive norm and those who tend to follow the personal norm, map onto the two sub-dimensions of Aquino and Reed's moral identity scale. We find partial evidence of this hypothesis: people higher in the symbolisation dimension are weakly more likely to follow the injunctive norm; however, we do not find any evidence that people higher in the internalisation dimension are more likely to follow the personal norm.