Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Cultural Norms and Institutions Organize Behavior?
Track what the messages say about behavior and approval, then separate assigned information from expectations reported after choosing.
Why you’re reading it. Test the opening distinctions in a controlled case before applying them to complex institutions.
A question to consider. If employees hear that most coworkers leave on time but managers disapprove, which parts of this experiment inform a prediction and which features of the workplace remain untested?
Why this reading
Bicchieri and Xiao separate information about what others do from information about what others think people should do. Their allocation experiment makes conflicting social expectations visible and tests how choices respond to them.
Before you read
In a dictator game, one participant chooses how to divide money with another who cannot reject the allocation. An empirical expectation concerns others’ behavior; a normative expectation concerns what others think one ought to do. Neither is identical to the participant’s own moral judgment.
Read for
- Track how the six information conditions create consistent or conflicting expectations, and how fairness is defined in this particular task.
- Separate the effect of assigned information from the association between a choice and expectations measured after that choice.
Consider afterwards
- What would change if recipients could reject an allocation or other participants could punish it?
- How might measuring expectations after a choice affect an explanation of why that choice occurred?
Editorial context
The experiment uses 254 University of Pennsylvania students, paired for a single allocation decision. Empirical expectations were especially predictive when messages conflicted, but this does not establish that normative expectations never matter. The authors discuss conditions in which the two work together and call for broader tests. Post-choice expectation reports and a narrow, anonymous task limit claims about psychological mediation and everyday norms. The accessible manuscript has different pagination from the journal article.