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Abstract
Experimental economics offers new tools for the measurement of social norms. In this article, we argue that these advances have the potential to promote our understanding of human behavior in fundamental ways, by expanding our knowledge beyond what we learn by simply observing human behavior. We highlight how these advancements can inform not only economic and social theory, but also policymaking.We then describe and critically assess three approaches used in economics to measure social norms. We conclude our overview with a list of recommendations to help empirical researchers choose among the different tools, depending on the nature and constraints of their research projects.

A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, we provide a compelling empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale experiments (n = 7,000) run in the United Kingdom, United States, and China show that laws can causally influence social norms. Results are robust across different samples and methods of measuring norms, and are consistent with a model of social image concerns where individuals care about the inferences others make about their underlying prosociality. (JEL C91, C92, D91, K00, K42, P37)

A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, this paper provides a clean empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale experiments featured around 5,800 subjects drawn from six samples recruited in the UK and China. Results show laws often, but not always, influence norms. Our findings are robust to different methods of measuring norms, and remain qualitatively similar across samples and between two countries with very different legislative environments.

We study how individuals' compliance with norms of pro-social behavior is influenced by other actors' compliance in a novel, dynamic, and non-strategic experimental setting. We are particularly interested in the role that social proximity among peers plays in eroding or upholding norm compliance. Our results suggest that social proximity is crucial. In settings without known proximity, norm compliance erodes swiftly because participants only conform to observed norm violations of their peers while ignoring norm compliance. With known social proximity, participants conform to both types of observed behaviors, thus halting the erosion of norm compliance. Our findings stress the importance of the broader social context for norm compliance and show that, even in the absence of social sanctions, compliance can be sustained in repeated interactions, provided there is group identification, as is the case in many social encounters in natural and online environments.