I show that a simple intervention---eliciting beliefs about what others do---reduces selfish behavior in settings involving a degree of moral ambiguity. Across two preregistered experiments---a moral wiggle room game and a dice-rolling game---forecasting others' behavior before choice reduced information avoidance by 18 percentage points and produced a weaker, marginally significant 19% reduction in aggregate excess payoffs consistent with misreporting, despite the absence of any new information. When beliefs about others' behavior were instead elicited after choice, stated forecasts aligned with participants' own selfish actions---a pattern consistent with post hoc rationalization. Regardless of when beliefs were elicited, evaluations of the appropriateness of behavior showed no detectable treatment differences. In a third experiment, a binary-choice dictator game where the 50-50 split norm is explicit, belief elicitation had no significant effect. The evidence suggests that internally held norms may not always be psychologically active, instead remaining latent---acknowledged but not salient at the moment of choice. Belief elicitation thus potentially offers a low-cost behavioral design tool for curbing opportunism where monitoring is limited. Finally, the results caution that belief elicitation is not a neutral measurement tool, with implications for experimental design and for comparing behavior inside and outside the laboratory.

People often avoid information about the harm their choices impose on others. Because such choices occur against beliefs about what others do, descriptive norms may license or restrain this strategic ignorance. In a preregistered 2 × 4 moral wiggle-room experiment (N = 1,020), participants predicted how often oth- ers acquired information, received randomly assigned truthful feedback about the ignorance rate observed in a comparable study, and then chose whether to reveal a recipient’s payoffs. Feedback moved behavior where it contradicted priors: news that ignorance was common raised avoidance by 10 percentage points, concentrated among participants who expected widespread revealing, while news that ignorance was rare reduced avoidance only among those who expected widespread ignorance. Because most participants held optimistic priors, licensing dominated in aggregate. Stated beliefs showed no self-serving distortion: participants who knew they would face the decision reported the same expectations as those who did not (equivalence within ±5 points). Descriptive norms shape strategic ignorance by licensing and cor- recting behavior—not through motivated belief formation—providing a belief-level account of when norm information helps and when it boomerangs.

While people often avoid learning about inconvenient or undesirable consequences of their actions in order to behave selfishly, many social situations involve another person who is in a position to impose this information. How does the presence of a potential informer affect information, behavior, and welfare in social decisions with moral wiggle-room? We introduce a third-party informer into the moral wiggle-room game. Almost half of the dictators tried to avoid information only to have it imposed upon them by the informer. These dictators frequently revised their behavior to benefit the recipient, even at their own expense. Given an opportunity to reward informers, most dictators chose to do so, but those who had bad news thrust upon them by the informer were more likely to withhold it. Interestingly, a subtle change in the choice interface - separating the dictator’s ignorance and allocation choices in two separate screens - caused a substantial reduction in the share of dictators choosing ignorance.

Although humans exhibit many prosocial behaviors, when the social benefits of their options are uncertain, surprisingly many avoid learning them before choosing, using ignorance as an excuse to dodge moral obligations and revert to selfish behavior. This kind of willful ignorance is robust in the sense that researchers have documented it using a wide array of methods, across diverse settings, and a time period spanning nearly two decades. At the same time, however, the degree to which it manifests is inconsistent across and within studies. Some of these inconsistencies stem from obvious factors, while the moderators driving others have yet to be identified or are poorly understood. This study synthesizes and organizes these contextual factors, providing recommendations for future research.

This paper proposes a belief-sensitive Markov model to study behavioral norm dynamics as a probabilistic process shaped by perceived social behavior and behavior-specific costs. Individuals transition between two behavioral conventions based on subjective beliefs about others' actions and the associated psychological and material costs of maintaining or changing behaviors. The model allows for asymmetric adaptation, where switching from one behavior to another may carry different costs depending on direction, and captures behavioral inertia even when beliefs are accurate. Under perfect information, beliefs align with observed behavior, isolating the effects of cost-driven frictions. This framework provides a flexible tool for modeling slow, uneven, or path-dependent norm shifts in settings such as tipping practices, recycling habits, or political participation.