Abstract: Accurately measuring social norms is crucial both for explaining cooperation and prosociality and for designing effective policy measures that support these. While established laboratory-based approaches represent “gold-standard” approaches, their practicality and widespread use are limited by the restrictions involved in their implementation. In contrast, non-incentivised survey measures are simple and widely used yet remain unvalidated, leaving it unclear what they truly capture. We address this gap by validating a popular set of non-incentivised measures against incentivised benchmarks across two diverse contexts—one WEIRD (Italy) and one non-WEIRD (India)—using student and general-population samples (N≈1,400) in laboratory and lab-in-the-field environments. Every measure is validated in seven settings representing a range of interaction domains including cooperation (e.g. Public Goods Game, Dictator Game). From these results, we assemble a menu of validated survey measures, highlighting their respective strengths and offering guidance for best practice across different research contexts and constraints.
This week's Cooperation Colloquium:
Aron Szekely @aronszekely.bsky.social
Measuring social norms with surveys
Date: Friday, April 24
Time: 15:00 UTC+2 (Vienna) / 9am ET (NYC)
Sign up: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...
