We explore the influence of social norms on behavior. To do so, we introduce a method for identifying norms, based on the property that social norms reflect social consensus regarding the appropriateness of different possible behaviors. We demonstrate that the norms we elicit, along with a...

This paper reports an experiment examining the effect of social norms on pro-social behavior. We test two predictions derived from work in psychology regarding the influence of norms. The first is a "focusing"influence, whereby norms only impact behavior when an individual’s attention is drawn...