Isabel Rodríguez Marín (Collegio Carlo Alberto)

Work in progress seminars

Measuring Social Norms in Italy and India

Abstract: Understanding and measuring social norms is crucial for explaining social behaviour and designing effective policy interventions. Yet we know relatively little about how social norms measures diverge across research and cultural contexts. In this project, we investigate the relationship between social norms and behaviour through a cross-cultural comparison of three experimental settings: a laboratory study in Italy, a laboratory study in India, and a lab-in-the-field study in India. Using a set of classical behavioural games and two additional behavioural tasks, we examine how behavioural patterns relate to locally shared normative considerations. Alongside these incentivised measures, we implement a comparable non-incentivised survey tool to explore how social norms can be effectively measured and how well survey-based measures correspond to actual behavioural regularities. The findings contribute to a broader understanding of the universality and variation of social norms and advance efforts to develop reliable, cross-culturally valid approaches to their measurement