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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2024‒07‒15
five papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Deer, Lachlan; Hsieh, Chih-Sheng; König, Michael D.; Vega-Redondo, Fernando |
| Abstract: | We study a dynamic model of collective action in which agents are connected by a social network. Our approach highlights the importance of communication in this problem and conceives that network &- which is continuously evolving &- as providing the channel through which agents not only interact but also communicate. We consider two alternative scenarios that differ only on how agents form their expectations: while in the "benchmark" context agents are completely informed, in the alternative one their expectations are formed through a combination of local observation and sociallearning à la DeGroot. We completely characterize the long-run behavior of the system in both cases and show that only in the latter scenario (arguably the most realistic) there is a significant long-run probability that agents eventually achieve collective action within a meaningful time scale. We suggest that this sheds light on the puzzle of how large populations can coordinate on globallydesired outcomes. Finally, we illustrate the empirical potential of the model by showing that it can be efficiently estimated for the Egyptian Arab Spring using large-scale cross-sectional data from Twitter. This estimation exercise also suggests that, in this instance, network-based social learning played a leading role in the process underlying collective action. |
| Keywords: | Collective Action; Networks; Coordination; Social Protests; Degroot; Social Learning |
| Date: | 2024–06–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:43961&r= |
| By: | Ylenia Brilli; Simone Moriconi |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes how culture affects the engagement of parents in child-rearing activities, and time allocations of parents inside the family. We use data from the World Value Survey to construct a country-specific measure of the value attached to obedience as a child quality, which we associate with the actual parenting behavior and time investments of first-and second-generation migrant parents in Australia. We show that migrant parents from countries in which obedience is more valued as an important child quality, are more likely to be warm and to enact discipline in their parent-child interactions. We also show that a higher value of obedience in the country of origin is associated with a shift of parental time from general care to playing activities, and from the weekdays to the weekends. These results are robust to a large set of sensitivity analyses, which account for omitted variable bias and selection. Finally, we provide evidence that this cultural value may feature a more egalitarian allocation of parenting vs. labor supply tasks at the household level, by increasing fathers’ parental time and mothers’ labor supply at the intensive margin. We interpret this as indirect evidence that fathers may have a greater marginal utility from parenting time than mothers, on average. |
| Keywords: | culture, parental investments, parenting, labor supply |
| JEL: | D10 J13 J15 J22 Z13 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11127&r= |
| By: | Seth R. Gitter (Department of Economics, Towson University); Grace Larocque (Towson University); Motunrayo Akinloye (Towson University) |
| Abstract: | The Taliban have devastated the rights of women in Afghanistan by limiting their ability to participate in society, potentially causing permanent harm to women's autonomy within their own marriages. We posit that women married during the Taliban rule may see reduced autonomy based on changes in gender norms from Taliban policy. We estimate the effect of being married during various levels of Taliban rule in 2002, 2009, and 2012 on outcomes in 2015. We use variation in the Taliban's control in a province at the time of marriage to estimate the effects of norms at the time of a marriage on outcomes measured in 2015. We find that women's decision-making power was higher in 2015 for those who married when their province was not under Taliban control, but surprisingly, their experience of intimate partner violence (IPV) also increased, suggesting that intrahousehold conflicts potentially increased from regime changes. We link these results to a previous literature that suggests that retaliatory IPV may occur as women gain more power and lower their fertility, with the finding that when the Taliban lost control, fertility fell substantially. These results suggest potential policies that address the long-term negative impacts of the Taliban rule on women's autonomy should the regime lose power again, with special attention given to potential increases in IPV. |
| Keywords: | Norms, Taliban, Marriage, Women Afghanistan. |
| JEL: | O2 J12 |
| Date: | 2024–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tow:wpaper:2024-06&r= |
| By: | Alger, Ingela; Gavrilets, Sergey; Durkee, Patrick |
| Abstract: | We describe a formal model of norm psychology that can be applied to better un-derstand norm change. The model integrates several proximate drivers of normative behavior: beliefs and preferences about a) material payoffs, b) personal norms, c) peer disapproval, d) conformity, and e) authority compliance. Additionally, we review inter-disciplinary research on ultimate foundations of these proximate drivers of normative behavior. Finally, we discuss opportunities for integration between the proposed formal framework and several psychological sub-fields. |
| Keywords: | ocial norms, preferences, beliefs, evolutionary foundations, ultimate drivers, proximate drivers, interdisciplinary research |
| Date: | 2024–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:iastwp:129422&r= |
| By: | Detemple, Julian |
| Abstract: | Experiments are an important tool in economic research. However, it is unclear to which extent the control of experiments extends to the perceptions subjects form of such experimental decision situations. This paper is the first to explicitly elicit perceptions of the dictator and trust game and shows that there is substantial heterogeneity in how subjects perceive the same game. Moreover, game perceptions depend not only on the game itself but also on the order of games (i.e., the broader experimental context in which the game is embedded) and the subject herself. This highlights that the control of experiments does not necessarily extend to game perceptions. The paper also demonstrates that perceptions are correlated with game behavior and moderate the relationship between game behavior and field behavior, thereby underscoring the importance and relevance of game perceptions for economic research. |
| Keywords: | dictator game, trust game, game perceptions |
| JEL: | C90 D01 D91 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:safewp:297999&r= |