Societies are rife with negative, damaging practices, from open defecation to female genital cutting, endemic in many developing countries, to corruption and violence against women and children that we also witness in many Western societies. The theoretical and practical challenge we face is twofold. On the one hand, we want to explain what generates and supports such practices. On the other, w...

Purpose This paper aims to theoretically answer the question: why might business schools in Egypt fail develop responsible leaders? Design/methodology/approach The author starts by discussing modernization theory (Lipset, 1959) – which highlights idea that more educated people there are a given society/nation, calls for democracy, social citizenship and justice will be launched address strong a...

Abstract In the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the ensuing dominance of political Islam discourse and its impact on Pakistani society, the ground was prepared for the spread of Wahhabism and anti-Shiism in that country due to the failure of the Islamabad government to manage the reactive conduct of extremist Salafist groups as well as its engagement in internal dis...

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...

We explore the idea that prosocial behavior in laboratory games is driven by social norms imported into the laboratory. Under this view, heterogeneity in behavior across subjects is driven by heterogeneity in sensitivity to social norms. We introduce an incentivized method of eliciting individual norm-sensitivity, and we show how it relates to play in public goods, trust, dictator and ultimatum...

In an economy where there is no double coincidence of wants and without public recordkeeping of past transactions, money is usually seen as the only mechanism that can support exchange. In this paper we show that, as long as the population is finite and agents are sufficiently patient, a social norm establishing gift-exchange can substitute for money. However, for a given discount factor, popul...

How do people sustain resources for the benefit of individuals and communities and avoid the tragedy of the commons, in which shared resources become exhausted? In the present study, we examined the role of serotonin activity and social norms in the management of depletable resources. Healthy adults, alongside social partners, completed a multiplayer resource-dilemma game in which they repeated...

Social norms help people self-organizing in many situations where having an authority representative is not feasible. On the contrary to institutional rules, the responsibility to enforce social norms is not the task of a central authority but a task of each member of the society. “The social norms I am talking about are not the formal, prescriptive or proscriptive rules designed, imposed, and ...

This paper examines the sexual and social practices of young people in contemporary Iran. Young people in urban areas live under the rubric of a fundamentalist, Islamist regime which restricts social freedoms such as premarital heterosexual contact, homosexual encounters, dancing, alcohol consumption and large group gatherings. Drawing on close focus research and individual and group inteviews,...