Measuring Norms : Assessing the Threat of Social Desirability Bias to the Bicchieri and Xiao Elicitation Method

Bicchieri and Xiao (2009) proposed one of the first methods to elicit normative expectations. Using a two-step procedure, the method first elicits non-incentivized reports of subjects’ Personal Normative Beliefs (PNBs) about which action is normatively best. In the second step, subjects are incentivized to predict the distribution of others’ reported PNBs, thus capturing their second order normative beliefs or normative expectations. The lack of incentives in the first step of the method introduces the potential for belief falsification. This paper explores the susceptibility of this pioneering norm elicitation method to Social Desirability Bias. We report pre-registered experiments that vary the threat of sanctioning by third party monitors, such that in one treatment, respondents may wish to falsify their beliefs about the norm in a variant of the dictator game. We show that anticipated SDB may be sufficient to induce misreporting of normative expectations. Researchers who plan to use this method to measure sensitive, local norms, especially in the field, should design their studies in a way that minimizes the risk that the anticipation of Social Desirability Bias influences respondents’ reports, biasing measures of normative expectations