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Date de publication : 23 nov. 2019 23:41:37
Abstract: We study the way in which parents teach their children to adhere to social norms in a natural, but controlled, setting. Given the central role of norms in governing our daily interactions, transmitting norm compliance from one generation to another is vital to guarantee the stability of the social system. One important reason for complying with a given social norm is the threat of being punished if one decides otherwise (Sugden, 1986; Coleman, 1994; Young, 2008). Indeed, norm enforcement has been attributed a crucial role in guaranteeing the evolutionary stability of social norms (Fehr and Fischbacher,2004). Teaching our children that norm violators will be punished may thus serve as an efficient deterrence mechanism to ensure future generation's norm compliance. We focus on the norm of non-littering and the violation thereof, the importance of which is universally accepted in the setting of our experiment. We provide parents an opportunity to enforce the norm - either directly or indirectly - and assess whether they are more likely to do so in the presence of their child, presumably with the aim of educating the child. To this end, we stage different scenes in the streets, using a trained actor. We vary whether the parent is with the child by targeting parents on their way from and to school. As a result, we assess comparable populations at roughly the same time of the day that only differ in whether or not the child is around. We consider three scenarios, which we stage close to elementary schools. In the first one, the experimenter litters in the clear sight of the targeted parent by throwing away a bag containing a banana peel. This scenario serves to study the prevalence of direct punishment by confronting the violator. In order to study indirect punishment, the littering act is followed by a helping opportunity in the second scenario. That is, the actor, after having thrown away the bag can, accidentally drops the content of his bag on the sidewalk. This presents the parent with an opportunity to withhold help as a form of punishment. Finally, in the third scenario, we only stage the helping opportunity in order to measure the base rate of helping.
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