The Reinforcing Effect of Identity Based Norm Compliance

• In Event: The Psychology of Partisanship

Abstract

Voters, in the voting booth, don’t just ask themselves “which party represents my interests?” but also ask “how is someone like me supposed to vote?” Voters weigh their personal preferences, rooted in their material interests, against the expectations of the political groups with which they identify. These expectations are norms, the rules of behaviour that we expect members of our group to follow and believe others in our group will expect us to follow in kind. However, the norms that inform an individual what policies, party or candidate one’s political group is expected to support or not support often do not match the individual’s personal preferences.
For example, the identity "conservative" in the US is normatively associated with increased restrictions on abortion. Nevertheless, many individuals who identify as conservative would personally prefer restrictions not be increased. When such conflicts between individual preference and identity arise, voting behavior reflects this tension, with some individuals putting sufficient weight on group norms to vote against their personal preferences. Individuals’ vote choices thus reflect trade-offs between personal interests and adherence to norms.

Under this view, when an individual privileges the group norm, this is the consequence of a rational trade-off between personal preferences and norm compliance, but it nevertheless does result in a personal cost. The consequence of incurring such a cost may be that the individual suffers from a form of cognitive dissonance. The individual finds herself in a position of having to justify to herself why she voted against her personal preferences. Therefore, when an individual experiences the cost of following the norm at the expense of her personal interests, the individual will engage in “effort justification”. This is a psychological process of reducing the cognitive dissonance associated with experiencing a cost due to a choice made. In effort justification, the individual increases the perceived value of the choice made in order to justify the cost. In this instance it is most easily done by magnifying the importance of the group and the associated norms. The result is that costly compliance with a norm can increase the salience and strength of the group identity to which the norm is attached and increase (future) adherence to the norm itself. Thus, group norm compliance may be self-reinforcing.

Using survey and lab experiments we test the reinforcing effect of norm compliance. The survey experiment includes 3000 British respondents and the lab experiment includes 200 US respondents. In the experiments, we focus on the expectations that individuals with specific political identities have regarding the policies other identity group members believe they should support – for example, the expectation that a liberal should support an increase in the minimum wage. We call these policy norms. The political identities we explore are partisan (e.g., Republican) and ideological (e.g., liberal).

First, we show that both partisan and ideological identity-based norms influence real-stakes voting behavior when the identity is made salient. Specifically, as the group identity and its associated policy norms are made salient, individuals become more willing to support policies normatively associated with their group, even if doing so results in a personal cost.

Second, we test whether individuals that pay a personal cost in order to avoid a norm violation, subsequently view the norm and the group identity with which the norm is associated as stronger (and more worthy of costly punishment for violation and/or costly reward for adherence). Specifically, we test whether individuals that incur a cost in order to comply with a group norm become more willing to engage in costly punishment/reward of others for violating/following the norm than others that did not experience such a cost. In this way, we test whether complying with a norm has a reinforcing effect on the norm.

In our design, subjects will be offered a fixed payment to perform either of two simple tasks. One of the tasks involves doing something that is inconsistent with group norms, and the other task involves doing something consistent with group norms. If the subject chooses the norm-consistent task, with some probability their payment is exogenously reduced; while, if they choose the norm-inconsistent task, they will receive their payment with certainty. After the task, they will have a chance to punish or reward a counterpart, conditioning their decision on the other’s possible action (and group identity). Our analysis compares the punishment/reward behavior of those who chose the norm-consistent task and incurred the exogenous cost to those who chose the norm-consistent task but did not incur the cost. If costly norm-compliance is self-reinforcing, we expect more punishment/reward among those who incurred the cost.

Authors

• Eline A. de Rooij, Simon Fraser University

• Mark A. Pickup, Simon Fraser University

• Erik O Kimbrough, Simon Fraser University