Experimental Design Details
The experiment's main treatment condition is whether the hypothetical unemployed person chooses to accept or reject the job offer. In line with the norm to work, we hypothesize that accepting the job offer is deemed more socially appropriate as it allows the person to be self-reliant and get by without financial help from others (partner, public funds…etc). Though we hypothesize that it is always more socially appropriate to work, we anticipate cultural differences in the magnitude of appropriateness depending on the strength of norms in general. We rely on previous work by Gelfand et al. (2011) and Uz (2015) to categorize countries in terms of the tightness of their culture.
H1. Accepting the job offer is more socially appropriate than rejecting the job offer, such that there exists a social appropriateness gap.
H1.1. The social appropriateness gap is particularly large in tight relatively cultures.
Following the Akerlof/Kranton identity utility model, the inborn individual characteristics of a person belonging to the ‘working age’ social group determine how much they are required to comply with the social norm to work (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000). On a societal level, prevalent gender roles influence how work is divided, how committed people are to their jobs and where they get their social status and identity from (Lewis 2009). A traditional gender role for a man is to be the financial provider for the family, the breadwinner, while the woman is the care provider, the caregiver. Thus, we suspect that there is a gendered aspect to the social norm to work such that meeting the norm to work matters more to men than to women in general. Hence, we hypothesize that the social norm to work assigns higher work expectations and obligations to men than to women, as long as the traditional role of the man holds true. We therefore randomly vary the gender of the hypothetical person in order to measure difference in the social appropriateness of unemployment depending on gender. In modern cultures, this gendered aspect may not be as clear, as traditional gender roles matter less and less. We, therefore, run the experiment in different countries which vary with respect to how traditional they are in terms of gender roles to examine how gender role effects vary between cultures.
H2. Accepting the job offer is more socially appropriate than rejecting the job offer, specifically if the decision taker is male.
H2.1 Accepting the job offer is more socially appropriate than rejecting the job offer, specifically if the decision taker is a male living in a gender-traditional culture.
We also test possible alternatives to paid work when it comes to complying with the social norm to work. We explore time use during unemployment as a means for norm adherence on an individual level. We examine the hypothesis that productive unpaid work such as household production (including childcare) and volunteer work can to some extent substitute paid work when trying to comply with the social norm to work. This is because both household work and volunteer work are contributions to the greater good of society in their own right. As in Chadi and Hetschko (2024), we choose hobbies as a comparison activity which is seen as a nonproductive leisure activity from a societal perspective.
H3.1. Accepting the job offer is more socially appropriate than rejecting the job offer, specifically if the decision taker pursues leisure activities in unemployment as compared to household production.
H3.2. Accepting the job offer is more socially appropriate than rejecting the job offer, specifically if the decision taker pursues leisure activities in unemployment as compared to volunteer work.
The experiment will allow us to extend Hypotheses 3.1 and 3.2 to account for cultural and gender differences.
In an additional analysis, we will modify our survey-based experimental design to examine prejudice within our US sample. US participants will be presented with a choice scenario in which the race of the individual taking the decision is varied (no indication of race, white race, black race). Our primary hypothesis is that, due to prejudice, participants will assign a higher social inappropriateness score to black individuals who decline job offers compared to white individuals exhibiting the same behavior. Indeed, previous work shows racial discrimination in low-wage job opportunities (Pager et al., 2009). Accordingly, black people who receive less work offers are more expected to take-on whatever job they are offered.
H4. Accepting the job offer is more socially appropriate than rejecting the job offer, specifically if the decision taker in the hypothesized choice tasks is black.
For our second standalone experiment, we rely on the work of Bicchieri (2005), Young (2015) and Tankard and Paluck (2016) which show that open communication and the act of sharing information can change people's perceptions and societal expectations. Hence, we expect that the social norm to work, measured as people’s perception of what others deem an appropriate labor market decision, may be altered through information presented before. Since we measure the social norm by asking people about the view of the majority of participants, we expect this view to be altered by information they received about societal trends. We hereby focus on two aspects of unemployment and the social norm to work, namely potential gender differences and benefit claims. First, we hypothesize that
H5.1. The social norm to work is strengthened, particularly for a female hypothetical decision-taker, when participants are told that a growing number of women are entering the workforce.
When it comes to benefit claims, we expect that a low number of benefit claimants conveys the impression of a strong social norm to work. We expect that
H5.2. The social norm to work is strengthened if participants are informed that "many unemployed people do not claim welfare benefits even though they are eligible to."
References
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Bicchieri, C. (2005). The grammar of society: The nature and dynamics of social norms. Cambridge University Press.
Chadi, A. & Hetschko, C. (2024): Income or Leisure? On the Hidden Benefits of (Un)Employment”. European Economic Review, forthcoming.
Clark, A. E. (2003). Unemployment as a social norm: Psychological evidence from panel data. Journal of Labor Economics, 21(2), 323-351.
Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., Lim, B. C., ... & Yamaguchi, S. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332(6033), 1100-1104.
Günther, T., Conradi, J., & Hetschko, C. (2024). Socialism, identity and the well-being of unemployed women. CESifo Working Paper 11154.
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Lewis, J. (2009). Work-Family Balance, Gender and Policy. Edward Elgar.
Pager, D., Bonikowski, B., & Western, B. (2009). Discrimination in a low-wage labor market: A field experiment. American sociological review, 74(5), 777-799.
Stutzer, A., & Lalive, R. (2004). The role of social work norms in job searching and subjective well-being. Journal of the European Economic Association, 2(4), 696-719.
Tankard, M. E., & Paluck, E. L. (2016). Norm perception as a vehicle for social change. Social Issues and Policy Review, 10(1), 181-211.
Uz, I. (2015). The index of cultural tightness and looseness among 68 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46(3), 319-335.