The effect of nudging personal and injunctive norms in the trade-off between objective equality and efficiency

Abstract

We report three pre-registered studies (total N=1,799) exploring the effect of nudging personal and injunctive norms in decisions that involve a trade-off between objective equality and efficiency. The first two studies provide evidence that: (i) nudging the personal norm has a similar effect as nudging the injunctive norm; (ii) when both norms are nudged in the same direction, there is no additive effect; (iii) when the personal norm and the injunctive norm are nudged in opposite directions, some people tend to follow the personal norm while others tend to follow the injunctive norm. Study 3 tests whether these two classes of people, those who tend to follow the injunctive norm and those who tend to follow the personal norm, map onto the two sub-dimensions of Aquino and Reed’s moral identity scale. We find partial evidence of this hypothesis: people higher in the symbolisation dimension are weakly more likely to follow the injunctive norm; however, we do not find any evidence that people higher in the internalisation dimension are more likely to follow the personal norm.