Isabel Rodríguez (Collegio Carlo Alberto)

A Validated Survey Instrument for Measuring Social Norms

Venue: Campus Luigi Einaudi, room 3 D1 01

Social norms are argued to be important drivers of social behaviour and solutions tosocietal problems (e.g. Nyborg et al. 2016) . A fundamental part of working with social norms for either purpose is measuring them. Yet, this is not simple. While there are accepted incentivised tools for measuring social norms in the laboratory (Bicchieri and Xiao 2009; Krupka and Weber 2013) , these are costly and restrictive in the populations they reach thereby limiting their research and policy use. Conversely, non-incentivised survey measures have been more widely used because of their simplicity, yet, these have not been validated and therefore it is unclear what they actually measure. Here we aim to address these issues by developing a behaviourally validated survey measure of social norms that is non-incentivised, simple, and portable across societies. We will subsequently implement our measure in a survey to identify gender restrictive norms (e.g. women’s freedom to work outside the home) in India and their key predictors. We do this by (i) eliciting people’s behaviour across a broad range of decision situations, (ii) measuring their social norms in these situations using the two established behavioural measures, and (iii) pitting multiple non-incentivised survey norms measures against each other in a “horse race” to identify which best predicts the established incentivised measures. We conduct this validation in four settings, varying study population and elicitation method: two laboratory studies with students (Turin, Italy, N≈500; Uttar Pradesh, India, N≈500), an online study with a representative sample of Italians (N≈1,000), and a lab-in-the-field study on a representative sample of subjects in India (Uttar Pradesh, N≈500). Finally, we will roll out the measure in a survey on gender norms (India, Uttar Pradesh, N≈10,000). The first laboratory validation is scheduled to begin in December 2024.