This paper investigates how moral ambiguity creates cognitive dissonance between self-interest and self-image, and how activating social norms can resolve this tension. When the causal link between actions and outcomes is unclear, individuals can exploit "moral wiggle room'' to behave selfishly while preserving a positive self-concept. I show that eliciting beliefs about others' behavior can preemptively activate latent social norms, reducing this dissonance and curbing opportunism. Across three incentivized experiments—a moral wiggle room game, a dice-rolling game, and a binary-choice dictator game—I find that social norms shape behavior under ambiguity but not when norms are already explicit. Norm information moderately shifted behavior: telling participants that 70% of others avoided information increased their own avoidance by 10 percentage points, while saying only 10% avoided information had no discernible effects on behavior. By contrast, eliciting beliefs before choice constrained selfishness—information avoidance fell by 18 percentage points in the dictator game, and dice-rollers' excess earnings from inflated reports dropped by 18%—not by correcting biased expectations but by preempting their formation and making norms salient at the moment of choice. In contrast, eliciting beliefs after choice reduced dissonance retrospectively: participants rationalized their behavior by inflating their stated expectations of others' selfishness. When fairness norms were unambiguous, belief elicitation had no meaningful effect (~2 percentage points), showing that its influence depends on activating latent norms within morally ambiguous environments rather than generally increasing generosity. These findings suggest that cognitive dissonance drives moral wiggle room under ambiguity, and that belief elicitation can resolve this dissonance by foregrounding social norms—thereby reducing selfish behavior and surfacing dormant normative commitments.

This paper examines whether eliciting beliefs about others’ behavior can reduce the use of moral wiggle room-the justifications that allow individuals to act selfishly while maintaining a positive self-image. Across two incentivized experiments, a moral wiggle room game and a dice-rolling task, belief elicitation reduced information avoidance, dishonesty, and opportunistic behavior. While participants often reported self-serving beliefs after acting selfishly, their appropriateness evaluations remained unchanged, suggesting that belief elicitation does not correct biased expectations but instead preempts their formation by activating latent social norms-contrary to Bayesian models of belief updating. By heightening social image concerns at the moment of choice, belief elicitation constrains moral wiggle room and shifts behavior toward prosocial outcomes. These findings clarify how norms influence ethical decision-making and position belief elicitation as a scalable, low-cost behavioral design tool for curbing opportunism where monitoring is limited.

People often avoid information to evade social obligations and justify selfish behavior. However, such behavior unfolds within a social context, where beliefs about others’ actions shape individual choices. This study examines how social expectations, shaped by perceived norms and decision framing, influence individuals’ willingness to avoid information. In a modified moral wiggle-room game, participants first predict how often others acquired information, then receive feedback about others’ information-seeking behavior before making their own decision as the dictator. The experiment manipulates (1) the feedback on norms participants receive, reflecting varying rates of information avoidance, and (2) whether they know in advance that they will be making the decision themselves, thereby inducing either a self- referential or socially framed perspective. Individuals were more likely to acquire information when exposed to norms favoring transparency, with pessimistic participants—those who believed ignorance was common—responding most strongly. Optimistic individuals showed little adjustment. Contrary to expectations, there was little evidence that participants distorted their beliefs about others to justify selfish behavior. However, a notable gender difference emerged: female participants, when primed with self-referential framing, were significantly less responsive to normative cues than males. Finally, an exploratory comparison with previous experiments suggests that belief elicitation itself, even in the absence of normative cues, significantly reduces information avoidance, highlighting a promising and scalable intervention for promoting transparency.

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.

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.

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.