Personal norms — and not only social norms — shape economic behavior

Abstract

We propose a simple utility framework and design a novel two-part experiment to study the relevance of personal norms across various economic games and settings. We show that personal norms — together with social norms and monetary payoff — are highly predictive of individuals’ behavior. Moreover, they are: (i) distinct from social norms across a series of economic contexts; (ii) robust to an exogenous increase in the salience of social norms; and (iii) complementary to social norms in predicting behavior. Our findings support personal norms as a key driver of economic behavior.