“Undoubtedly, laws are sometimes effective because they are backed by the threat of sanctions. This threat prompts individuals to weigh the risks and benefits before deciding whether or not to engage in a prohibited activity. Accordingly, standard economic analysis is based on the assumption that if the expected costs of the behavior – consisting of the severity and probability of punishment – exceed the expected benefit, the actor will refrain from this behavior (Becker 1968),” Bilz and Nadler write. Laws and other formal rules are “obligations supported by incentives”. In this article, we explore how formal rules affect cooperative behavior. Our analysis is based on a series of experimental games of the common good that aim to isolate the effects of the minimum contributions (obligations) required exogenously from those of the marginal incentives they support. We find that commitments have a significant impact on cooperative behavior, even without incentives. Where non-binding incentives are introduced, the requested contributions shall support cooperation. Unlike cases where incentives crowd out cooperative behaviour, in our experiences, commitments and incentives complement each other and collectively support high levels of contribution.
In addition, we find that differences in commitments influence behaviour even when incentives are kept constant. Finally, we look at the behavioral channels of the previous findings and find that both people`s beliefs about each other`s contributions and willingness to collaborate come into play. Norms have always been the subject of legal discourse and are generally defined in light of the Humean distinction between “should” and “is” in the context of the former. In the social sciences, and especially in psychology, norms are understood a little differently. Standards are considered to represent the “typical performance of a group or individual … with which comparisons can be made”. It is important to note that social norms are “socially determined consensus norms” that show either “which behaviours are considered typical in a particular context (descriptive norms)” or “which behaviours are considered appropriate in the context (injunction norms)”. The latter standards are commonly referred to as prescriptive standards and refer to the legal definition of standards as a product of the term “should”, while the former standards provide a descriptive statement. Of course, the nuances and details of what social norms are, why they exist, and how literature might be structured on them are complex and controversial (insights here, here, or here). Experimental and empirical literature has examined how laws influence personal norms. A first wave of studies (e.g.
[9], in a laboratory coordination game, [10-12], in the context of social dilemmas and [13], in the field) shows that laws influence behaviors that go beyond changing monetary incentives. Most of these studies argue that the results are consistent with the fact that laws change personal norms. A second wave of studies provides direct evidence of this effect of laws. [14] show that legal recognition of same-sex partnerships is associated with a significant improvement in personal standards towards sexual minorities. Using a vignette experiment [15], we show that laws influence whether people perceive certain behaviors as socially appropriate. However, very few articles examine how laws affect the perception of social norms, with the exception of [16, 17], which compares perceived social norms before and after intervention in a single country – without controlling for the possible confounding effects of time-varying factors. In The Oxford Handbook of Behavioural Economics and the Law, Eyal Zamir and Doron Teichman (eds.) 2014, Chapter 10, “Law, Moral Attitudes and Behavioural Change” by Kenworthey Bilz and Janice Nadler, the authors argue for laws and punishments that actually help shape our own internal ethics of how we perceive certain behaviors. Various laws and rules have changed (or attempted) human behavior regarding their food choices, especially in the West as obesity rates rise and rise. In the UK, for example, it was reported in late 2018 that a study in which supermarkets removed sweets and chips from checkouts resulted in almost a fifth fewer unhealthy products being sold. Individual behaviour is influenced both by material incentives, especially those codified by law, and by social sanctions or rewards enshrined in norms of behaviour. There is growing interest in the interactions between laws and norms in both law and economics. [1] Propose a theoretical framework that formalizes two types of interactions.
First, by altering material payments, laws influence the norm of behavior, which is understood as an object of balance: when fewer people perform the condemned acts, the social stigma associated with these actions increases. Second, laws provide information about societal values when there is fundamental uncertainty about the prevailing social norm. Both mechanisms involve a change in the perceived social norm as a result of the implementation of a law; Because in the first case, the norm has actually changed and in the second case via an information channel. Taking into account these interactions between laws and norms is essential to understand why policies to promote cooperation fail or succeed (see [2, 3] for recent overviews). In this article, we use the announcement of a sudden lockdown in the UK to provide causal evidence that laws affect people`s perception of social norms. We also show that the most plausible mechanism is an information channel rather than a direct change in social norms. The British context had several characteristics that favoured this channel of information. First, the population was initially pessimistic about the dominant norm, as evidenced by the large misperception gap before March 23, leaving room for new information to influence beliefs. Second, as described in the data in the section, enforcement was lower in the UK than in other countries, reducing the potential for direct impact on social norms themselves. In this context, our results show that the law provides information, leading to a major shift in the perception of social norms.
Our study sheds new light on the mechanisms that explain why and under what circumstances laws are effective, and contributes to a better understanding of how perceptions of dominant social norms are formed. As with duels, laws that strongly conflict with existing norms tend to backfire, Jackson said. “The brutal tightening of laws is causing considerable anarchy.” Benabou & Tirole (2011) provide a powerful theoretical account of the relationship between laws and social norms. They theorize that laws and social norms interact in two different ways: first, laws modify material payments and thus influence the factual behavior of the group understood as an object of equilibrium and thus the associated descriptive social norm. For example, the fine for smoking in restaurants increases the social stigma associated with smoking and creates a new descriptive norm of not smoking in restaurants. These results are fascinating for several reasons. First, they shed light on the empirical relationship between laws and social norms and promote the growing literature in this field in general, which is closely related to research on the “expressive function of law” (read more here, here, here or here) and its application to Covid-19 (see here and here). Second, they provide information to decision-makers. The use of descriptive social norms (e.g.
on laws) can lead to behavioural change, probably at low cost. In the context of data from Galbiati et al., this seems to work particularly well when misperceptions are widespread, which can be the case when regulation is stricter in other countries and people sympathize with justifications (as perhaps for Covid-19 and the relatively late announcement of a lockdown in the UK).