A large body of literature has shown that social norms can be a powerful driver of human actions, and norm interventions often focus on shifting beliefs about average or majoritarian behavior. This work addresses a less studied aspect of norms, namely the role that their strength, tightness, and...

Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are in fashion. They have been discussed in all fields: economics, science and even politics. It remains to know what the term hides. Of course, there are these fantastic discoveries that show that machines now outperform humans in specific tasks. In the...

The question of whether global norms are experiencing a crisis allows for two concurrent answers. From a facticity perspective, certain global norms are under crisis, given their world-wide lack of implementation and effectiveness. From a validity perspective, however, a crisis is not obvious,...

Peer punishment is widely considered a key mechanism supporting cooperation in human groups. Although much research shows that human behavior is shaped by the prevailing social norms, little is known about how punishment decisions are impacted by the social context. We present a set of...

Throughout the Western world, people's policy views are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. This paper proposes that what partly explains the structure of ideology is moral universalism: the extent to which people's altruism and trust remain constant as social distance...

This paper studies how people incur in cost to punish norm violators, what is known as social punishment. Specifically, in a laboratory experiment, we widely varied both the cost and the impact of punishing to model the indifference curve reflecting the decision to punish or not to punish. Given...

The main contribution of this paper lies in applying Adam Smith’s moral theory to explain how some actions become jointly recognized as socially appropriate while others do not, and how these jointly recognized rules affect actual behavior. To illustrate the strength of Smith’s theory, we...

The growth of epitaxial heterostructure is vital to the industrial and science community. However, due to the lattice mismatch and dissimilar thermal expansion coefficient, it is not easy to realize such engineering. This motivates us to try to understand the key factors in the field of crystal...

This paper investigates the relevance of social convention theory (SCT) for explaining the persistence of female genital cutting (FGC) in a broad sample of African countries. While influential in policy circles, the idea that FGC is primarily a bad equilibrium in a social coordination game has...

The field of behavioural ethics seeks to clarify how people behave when confronted with ethicaldilemmas. It has identified and analysed numerous mechanisms by which people may engage inunethical and illegal behaviour without fully recognizing its implications. In the field of employment law,...