CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

ABSTRACT: When participants are incentivized to estimate others´ opinion of the socially appropriate behavior (i.e., the prescriptive norm) in a Dictator Game (DG), they then make more altruistic decisions in the game. Authors have interpreted this result in terms of Norm Focus Theory (Cialdini et al., 1990), that is, the idea that norms influence behavior when they are attended to. Nonetheless, alternative explanations have not been discarded yet. First, the incentive present in the estimation exercise increases earning prospects which might be responsible for increased generosity. Second, the estimation exercise makes participants think of a number which might anchor their subsequent decision closer to the equitable share. The goal of the present study was to replicate the effect of prescriptive norms on subsequent DG decisions with an Argentine sample, and to clarify the interpretation of this phenomenon. In experiment 1a, we replicated the original finding with university students from Argentina. In experiment 1b, we controlled for extra earning prospects by having a condition in which the norm estimation exercise involved no monetary incentive. We found this treatment to have a similar effect relative to the condition in which the norm estimation was incentivized (causing greater generosity than the control), thus showing that the normative exercise had an effect on generosity regardless of the monetary prospect associated with it. Last, in experiment 1c, the estimation exercise involved a DG with a monetary pie that doubled that of the actual game, implying that the fair share in the estimation exercise coincided with the most selfish choice in the actual game. We found no evidence that the number associated with the estimated norm anchored DG decisions. We conclude that the Norm Focus interpretation was supported with added rigor, and we discuss these findings in terms of the psychological mechanisms that may underlie normative behaviors.