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Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement

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  • Wojtek Przepiorka
  • Andreas Diekmann
Abstract
Social norms promote cooperation in everyday life because many people are willing to negatively sanction norm breakers at a cost to themselves. However, a norm violation may persist if only one person is required to sanction the norm breaker and everyone expects someone else to do it. Here we employ the volunteer’s dilemma game (VOD) to model this diffusion of responsibility in social norm enforcement. The symmetric VOD is a binary choice game in which all actors have the same costs of and benefits from cooperation and only one actor’s cooperation is required to provide the collective good for the group. The asymmetric VOD differs from the symmetric VOD in one (strong) actor having lower costs of cooperation. In a laboratory experiment, we find that, in line with the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis, subjects’ propensities to sanction the norm breaker decrease with group size in the symmetric VOD. In the asymmetric VOD, groups tacitly coordinate on the strong subject to sanction the norm breaker alone. Although at first lower in larger groups, strong subjects’ sanctioning rates increase over time and reach equally high levels across different group sizes. Our results show that heterogeneous groups can be more effective in achieving norm compliance than groups of all equals because they naturally evade diffusion of responsibility in social norm enforcement.

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  • Wojtek Przepiorka & Andreas Diekmann, 2018. "Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(11), pages 1-18, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0208129
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0208129
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Konrad, Kai A. & Morath, Florian, 2020. "The Volunteer’s Dilemma in Finite Populations," CEPR Discussion Papers 15536, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Campos-Mercade, Pol, 2021. "The volunteer’s dilemma explains the bystander effect," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 186(C), pages 646-661.
    3. Yixuan Shi, 2022. "Dynamic Volunteer's Dilemma with Procrastinators," Working Papers tax-mpg-rps-2022-17, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.
    4. Kai A. Konrad & Florian Morath, 2021. "The volunteer’s dilemma in finite populations," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 31(4), pages 1277-1290, September.
    5. Jan Schmitz, 2019. "When Two Become One: How Group Mergers Affect Solidarity," Games, MDPI, vol. 10(3), pages 1-42, July.
    6. Nshakira-Rukundo, Emmanuel & Mussa, Essa Chanie & Gerber, Nicolas & von Braun, Joachim, 2020. "Impact of voluntary community-based health insurance on child stunting: Evidence from rural Uganda," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 245(C).
    7. Kloosterman, Andrew & Mago, Shakun, 2023. "The infinitely repeated volunteer's dilemma: An experimental study," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 812-832.
    8. Dax Enshan Koh & Kaavya Kumar & Siong Thye Goh, 2024. "Quantum Volunteer's Dilemma," Papers 2409.05708, arXiv.org.

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