Social Norm

The authors look at online tip exchanges as parts of gift economies created by the players and designers of console and online role-playing games in Taiwan. A group of experienced players and tip contributors agreed to be interviewed about the mechanisms and processes of providing free strategy guides on the Internet. Their comments reveal needs for social approval and networking in addition to their perceptions of rational exchange in the interest of completing games. The authors speculate on the social norms behind tip cultures, and their influences on game play and management.

ABSTRACT." Over the past three decades, Arab society in Israel has been undergoing processes of transition. These processes are mani-fested by changes in the economy, education, the status of women, family structure, and by socio-culturat changes and transformations in patterns ...

Cross-cultural research is dominated by the use of values despite their mixed empirical support and their limited theoretical scope. This article expands the dominant paradigm in crosscultural research by developing a theory of cultural tightness-looseness, the strength of social norms and degree of sanctioning within societies, and advancing a multilevel research agenda for future research. Through an exploration of the

Unless people pay the taxes they are obliged to pay, a general welfare state will eventually collapse. Thus, for the welfare state to survive in the long run, tax compliance is of utmost importance. Using Swedish individual survey data we analyze which factors affect the perception of tax evasion. The analysis is conducted on ten different taxes and the results differ widely. Hence, we show that it is important to study different taxes separately rather than treating tax evasion as one common phenomenon. In this paper we focus on the importance of different kinds of trust. Whether or not people in general are regarded as trustworthy only has a minor impact on perceived tax evasion. Instead, what matters is trust or distrust in politicians. People who distrust the parliament are more likely than others to think that tax evasion is common, and the result holds for most of the taxes studied. This may have severe long-run consequences for the welfare state. If people stop trusting their...

Throughout the process of being treated for mood and anxiety disorders,people dream of the ‘‘normal life’’ that awaits them. However, post-therapy,the distinctiveness of clinical normality (i.e., reduced symptomatology) andsocial normativity become more apparent. In this article we suggest that forpeople who have long felt socially excluded because of their psychiatric symp-toms, being ‘‘normally shy’’ or ‘‘normally awkward’’ is not enough. Insteadthey aspire to an ideal life. This confusion between means and ends, betweena nonsymptomatic self, a normative self, and an ideal self, leads these indivi-duals to long-term self-doubt and confusion about how to reach their elusivegoals. Yet, their never-ending pursuit of normative ideals applies to ‘‘normal’’and ‘‘abnormal’’ people alike. An analysis of narratives of exclusion allows usto reflect the life-long search for social inclusion via a normal life

Social interactions provide a set of incentives for regulating individual behavior. Chief among these is stigma, the status loss and discrimination that results from the display of stigmatized attributes or behaviors. The stigmatization of behavior is the enforcement mechanism behind social norms. This paper models the incentive effects of stigmatization in the context of undertaking criminal acts. Stigma is a flow cost of uncertain duration which varies negatively with the number of stigmatized individuals. Criminal opportunities arrive randomly and an equilibrium model describes the conditions under which each individual chooses the behavior that, if detected, is stigmatized. The comparative static analysis of stigma costs differs from that of conventional penalties. One surprising result with important policy implications is that stigma costs of long duration will lead to increased crime rates.

A well–established fact in monetary theory is that a key ingredient for the essentiality of money is its role as a form of memory. In this paper we study a notion of memory that includes information about an agent's past actions and trading opportunities but, in ...

To be effective, criminal justice policies should affect the underlying social norms for which the policies were enacted. This study sought to determine whether public perceptions of criminal justice policies on domestic violence affected social norms. Two waves of data were collected via a telephone survey where a random probability sample of 973 residents was drawn from 4 communities. A structural equation model was tested and confirmed. Results provided strong support for the hypothesis that perceptions of criminal justice policies have direct effects on attitudes toward criminal justice response, and indirect effects on victim-blaming attitudes, both underlying social norms related to domestic violence. The enactment of criminal justice policies, therefore, may have an impact beyond victims and perpetrators and lead to a transformation of the community through the emergence of new social norms. Public awareness campaigns designed to disseminate criminal justice policies may be instrumental in provoking social change.

We systematically explore decision situations in which a decision maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own in situations of payoff equality. In the gain domain we confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion. This is however not attributable to a 'cautious shift' as often thought. Indeed, looking at risk attitudes in the loss domain, we find an increase in risk seeking under responsibility. This raises issues about the nature of various decision biases under risk, and to what extent changed behavior under responsibility may depend on a social norm of caution in situations of responsibility versus naive corrections from perceived biases. To further explore this issue, we designed a second experiment to explore risk-taking behavior for gain prospects offering very small or very large probabilities of winning. For large probabilities, we find increased risk aversion, thus confi...

The author explores three models of individual bankruptcy law which might provide some guidance for analysing policy and for posing further research questions in relation to bankruptcy as a legal and social institution. The models are: (1) Bankruptcy law as a response to deviant behaviour; (2) Bankruptcy as consumer protection; (3) Bankruptcy as social welfare law. Some tentative thoughts are also offered on the comparative analysis of consumer bankruptcy as a focus for understanding relationships between legal and social norms.

The Organizational Culture Inventory measures 12 sets of normative beliefs or shared behavioral expectations associated with three general types of cultures, Constructive, Passive-Defensive, and Aggressive-Defensive These cultural norms are hypothesized to influence the thinking and behavior of organizational members, their motivation and performance, and their satisfaction and stress. As components of organizational culture, behavioral expectations are considered to be shared and enduring in nature. Tests of three types of reliability—internal consistency, interrater, and test-retest—and two types of validity—construct and criterion-related—on data provided by 4,890 respondents indicate that the inventory is a dependable instrument for assessing the normative aspects of culture. Obtained alpha coefficients support the internal consistency of the scales; tests for interrater agreement show that significant variance in individuals' responses is explained by their organizational m...

Critics recently have focused attention on the roles of race and gender in Shakespeare's Othello, examining how the play interrogates social norms and disagreeing over whether those norms ultimately are subverted or upheld. However, in focusing on the play's Caucasian, patriarchal society, critics have largely overlooked the textual issue of age: Othello and Desdemona are separated by as much as a generation. The mature Othello would bring to mind for early modern audiences several theatrical and social conventions, from the Roman comedic tradition to the role of the aged cuckold. These conventions generally are challenged in the early part of the play, then upheld in later acts as Othello descends into Iago's alternative reality. This article demonstrates how early modern views of age and aging work with racial stereotypes both to ennoble the character of Othello and to destroy him.