Probing mechanisms of norm internalization

• In Event: 2-032 - The foundations of social norm psychology

Integrative Statement

Fairness norms govern our behavior in the context of social exchange. Whereas norms are pervasive and powerful and emerge early in ontogeny, little is known about how they are internalized. One reason for this gap is that processes of norm internalisation are difficult to capture. Here we present a novel task that allows probing the extent to which fairness norms have been internalised and use this to predict actual behavior in resource allocation tasks. Our task leverages response speed to categorising fair and unfair allocations as a proxy for norm internalisation.

In Study 1, 24 adults were given three tasks: 1) A Dictator Game, in which 9 monetary units could be shared with anonymous others (10 trials); 2) A Fairness Judgment, where participants had to explicitly rate whether a range of allocations were fair or not; 3) And a novel Go/NoGo task. In the Go/NoGo task participants saw fair or unfair allocations displayed below the outlines of two heads and depending on the condition were asked to respond to either the fair allocations (Social Fair Go) or the unfair allocations (Social Unfair Go). We reasoned that response speed to fair allocations over unfair allocations might index the degree to which fairness norms of a 50-50 split have been internalised. To control for any effects of symmetry, the same conditions were given without head outlines (NonSocial Fair Go and NonSocial Unfair Go). All conditions were fully counterbalanced across participants.

We found that the time to make a decision in the Dictator Game was positively correlated with how fast subjects responded to Fair Go trials compared to Unfair Go trials controlled for RTs in the NonSocial condition. In other words, the faster participants decided to share the more quickly they responded to the visual presentation of fair allocations compared to unfair allocations. We replicated this finding in a second study (Study 2) with 24 adults.

These findings provide novel evidence how processes of norm internalisation are related to decisions in resource allocation paradigms. Further, the above-mentioned approaches lend themselves to probing the acquisition of norms in ontogeny.

Author

• Nikolaus Steinbeis, University College London
  Presenting Author