CeDEx Seminar - Irenaeus Wolff (University of Konstanz)

Whose Norms to Follow? A Field Experiment on Both Sides of a Border

We run a field experiment on littering behaviour on both sides of the Swiss-German border, to study whether---and to what degree---people adapt their behaviour to the local norms instead of sticking to their own personal norms. Both the Swiss and the Germans litter less on the Swiss side (controlling for observables or not). While the Swiss perfectly adapt to the local norms, Germans even tend to over-adapt. We complement the evidence from the field study by two surveys that show that the observed behaviour closely follows descriptive-norm perceptions. The survey evidence is consistent with the Swiss' behaviour being fully driven by the different descriptive norms, while the Germans' additionally seem to be taking differences in fines into account.