Social norms are becoming weaker

Social Norms

Social norms and customs shape many economic decisions, but they have not always been at the forefront of economic analysis. Indeed, social influences were more prominently acknowledged by the founders of the discipline than by neoclassical theorists of the last century. J.S. Mill, for example, argued that custom was a potent force in setting the terms of contracts and also the wages paid to la...

Social Norms

Social Norms and Moral Norms Workshop Social Norms and Moral Norms Workshop Welcome Address

Dear Participant, We are very pleased to welcome you at the GATE research institute. This workshop aims at developing scientific discussions about Social Norms and Moral Norms. The objective is to better understand when people are more, or less, likely to act honestly and follow the moral course of action and norms instead of serving their strict self-interest at the others' expense. We are ext...

Are social norms and reciprocity necessary for early helping?

Cortes Barragan and Dweck (1) present evidence that social interactions influence subsequent helping behavior in young children: 2-y-olds are more likely to help an adult when they previously engaged in interactive play, compared with when the child and an adult played in parallel or never interacted. This study shows that helping is a rich social interaction embedded in the context of social e...

Social Exclusion and Social Norms

Being excluded and ignored has been shown to threaten fundamental human needs and cause pain. Such reflexive reactions to social exclusion have been conceptualized as direct and unmoderated (temporal need threat model, Williams, 2009). Here we propose an extension and argue that reflexive reactions depend on how social exclusion situations are construed. If being excluded is understood as a vio...