We consider a society with informed individuals (adults) and naive individuals (children). Adults are altruistic towards their own children and possess information that allows to better predict the behavior of other adults. Children benefit from adopting behaviors that conform to the social norm...

In a setting where inequality is ingrained and largely unavoidable (battle of the sexes), we investigate whether subjects condition their behaviour on the gender of their co-player. In order to identify the role of culture and gender norms, we run the experiment in two countries, Norway and...

Descriptive norms - the behavior of other individuals in one's reference group - play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior. In this paper, we argue both theoretically and...

Building on findings showing that laws exert a causal effect on social norms, this paper investigates whether this "expressive power of law" differs by gender or race. We develop a model to show that such differences are theoretically plausible. We then use an incentivized vignette experiment to...

We document a sharp increase in hate crime in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. We show that this rise was more pronounced in more pro-remain areas. These facts are consistent with a model in which individual behavior is dictated by a desire to conform to imperfectly observable social...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals strategically distort their beliefs about dominant norms. Embedded in the context of lying, we systematically vary both the nature of elicited beliefs (descriptive about what others do, or normative about what others approve of) and whether...

This paper focuses on belief distortion in the context of lying decisions. We employ a twostage variant of the "dice under the cup" paradigm, in which subjects' beliefs are elicited in stage 1 before performing the dice task in stage 2. In stage 1, we elicit the subjects' beliefs about (i)...