Link to GitHub Study of social norms using social network approach (Afanasyev Kirill)

GitHub

Description (CP)

Introduction

There are the wide range of research on social norms that uses laboratory experiments to study them. For example, social proximity is essential for norm compliance. If person observes that little number of people do not comply with the norm, he or she usually became to stop comply with the norm, but if the person observe the behaviour of proximate peers, the contagious effect of little number of norm violators is much less than in the first case (Bicchieri et al., 2022). But this experiment exploits synthetic social proximity that was modelled in the lab that has little external validity. This problem suggests using real social networks of people to study questions like this. Kashima et al (2013) using snowball sampling approach have found that people’s beliefs on how other people behave (empirical expectations) are formed by what their acquaintances do and not by what their acquaintances say about others behaviour.

In the current research, we are aimed to study formation of normative expectations (beliefs about how other people consider they ought to behave), what attributes of social network affects normative expectations.

We are going to study this topic implementing Krupka and Weber (2013) Coordination game in snowball sampling survey.

Design

In the survey we will ask participants to rate social appropriateness of some behaviour (e.g. rejection of the vaccination, doom scrolling, unsafe sex). Participants will be instructed to state their belief about how most of the people in their social network (this term must be clarified) consider on this topic. Also, participants will be asked to invite some of their friends to participate in the survey using personal inviting link. Moreover, participants will get additional payoff if their social appropriateness rating matches the answer of one random participant in the network with distance 3. Data will be analyzed using autologistic actor attribute models (ALAAM) as in the (Kashima et al., 2013).

Ref Bicchieri, C., Dimant, E., Gächter, S., & Nosenzo, D. (2022). Social proximity and the erosion of norm compliance. Games and Economic Behavior, 132, 59–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2021.11.012

Kashima, Y., Wilson, S., Lusher, D., Pearson, L. J., & Pearson, C. (2013). The acquisition of perceived descriptive norms as social category learning in social networks. Social Networks, 35(4), 711–719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2013.06.002

Krupka, E. L., & Weber, R. A. (2013). Identifying Social Norms Using Coordination Games: Why Does Dictator Game Sharing Vary? Journal of the European Economic Association, 11(3), 495–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/jeea.12006