Professor Ernst Fehr from the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich for our final External Seminar of the spring term on Love and Conflict.
The Dynamics of Norm Formation and Norm Decay by Ernst Fehr & Ivo Schurtenberger.
Professor Fehr's research focuses on the proximate patterns and the evolutionary origins of human altruism and the interplay between social preferences, social norms and strategic interactions. Fehr’s work is characterized by the combination of game theoretic tools with experimental methods and the use of insights from economics, social psychology, sociology, biology and neuroscience for a better understanding of human social behavior. Ernst Fehr has numerous publications in international top journals including Science, Nature, and Neuron.
Abstract
Social norms are a ubiquitous feature of social life and pervade almost every aspect of human social interaction. However, despite their importance we still have relatively little empirical knowledge about the forces that drive the formation, the maintenance and the decay of social norms. Here, we present a new method that makes norms identifiable, continuously observable and, thus, empirically measurable. We show – in the context of public goods provision – the quick emergence of a widely accepted social cooperation norm that demands high contributions but – in the absence of the punishment of free-riders – norm violations are frequent and, therefore, the initial normative consensus as well as the high cooperation demands required by the norm break down. However, when peer punishment is possible, norm violations are rare from the beginning and a strong and stable normative consensus as well as high contribution requests prevail throughout. Thus, when norm compliance is costly, social norms tend to unravel unless norm violations are kept to a minimum. In addition, our results indicate that – in an environment that has previously shown to be detrimental for cooperation and welfare – the opportunity to form a social norm unambiguously causes high public good contributions and group welfare when peer-punishment is possible.
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https://umu.zoom.us/j/4378402892