Social Norms Versus Social Responsibility: Punishing Transgressions under Conflicting Obligations

Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Acknowledgments We thank Nicholas P. Lovrich and the Division of Government Studies and Services at Washington State University for the opportunity to work with the Washington State Patrol on this project. Brady Horn and Dick Doane provided considerable help in data provision. We also thank participants at the 2012 Academy of Management Meeting in Boston and at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics for their insightful comments on presentations based on earlier drafts of this paper. We greatly appreciate the support and facilities of the Abstract This paper combines experimental and field data to examine how those with discretion over punishment respond when confronted with social norms of leniency. Specifically, we test how individuals who have a responsibility to punish transgressions behave when confronted with the social norm of preferential treatment on people's birthdays. We first establish the existence of this social norm using a scenario study. We then show that individuals behave in the opposite way than that suggested by the social norm: they punish transgressors more severely on their birthdays, both in the realm of actual drunk driving enforcement and in an experimental lab setting where participants were given the responsibility to punish. An additional experiment provides evidence that this effect is driven by psychological reactance rather than by overcompensation for potential bias. We discuss both the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.