Social Norms Offer Explanation for Inconsistent Effects of Incentives on Prosocial Behavior
Caroline Graf, Eva-Maria Merz, Bianca Suanet, Pamala Wiepking

TL;DR
This paper proposes that social norms explain the inconsistent effects of incentives on prosocial behavior, demonstrated through a model and empirical analysis of blood donation across 28 European countries.
Contribution
It introduces a formal model integrating social norms to explain incentive effects and empirically tests it on blood donation data across multiple countries.
Findings
Incentives increase prosocial behavior when norms are positive.
Social norms significantly influence the effectiveness of incentives.
The model explains cross-country variations in incentive effects.
Abstract
Incentives have surprisingly inconsistent effects when it comes to encouraging people to behave prosocially. Classical economic theory, according to which a specific behavior becomes more prevalent when it is rewarded, struggles to explain why incentives sometimes backfire. More recent theories therefore posit a reputational cost offsetting the benefits of receiving an incentive -- yet unexplained effects of incentives remain, for instance across incentive types and countries. We propose that social norms can offer an explanation for these inconsistencies. Ultimately, social norms determine the reputational costs or benefits resulting from a given behavior, and thus variation in the effect of incentives may reflect variation in norms. We implemented a formal model of prosocial behavior integrating social norms, which we empirically tested on the real-world prosocial behavior of blood…
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