Experimental Design
The goal of this experiment is to explore the role played by social identity, and particularly its mechanism of outgroup differentiation, in facilitating dissent, and thus help clarify how norms change. To this end, Israeli participants belonging to different political groups will be asked to state their opinions on a variety of social and political issues. Survey participants will view randomly varied information about descriptive norms in both their ingroups and outgroups. Some questions will use data from different rounds of the European Social Survey. Other questions will use subsamples of each political group from a preliminary survey where participants did not observe others' choices. Specifically, binary questions (e.g., "Do you support or oppose reducing capital gains tax on investments in the Israeli stock market?") will show distributions from small random samples of each group, while continuous questions (e.g., "What do you think the required majority of Knesset members should be to enact Basic Laws?") will show average choices from randomly selected quantile combinations. For issues where the direction of group norms is likely known but their magnitudes are uncertain, we will preserve the expected direction while varying the magnitude of the displayed norms.
Participants will be cross-randomized to either be or not be informed that their choices may be made observable to others who may determine their bonus payment. We will also run another survey where other participants belonging to the same groups will be able to sanction ingroup norm deviators (or compliers) from the first survey by determining their bonus payment under two main informational conditions: when the observed choice deviates from the ingroup norm either in the same—or in the opposite—direction as the outgroup's norm, taking into account the distance between observed norms and individual choices. To achieve this, we will fix the observed choice in each decision while varying the norm information so that the same deviation either aligns with or opposes the outgroup norm, based on choices from the first survey. We will also incentivize participants to correctly guess the percent of subjects who chose to punish the norm deviators under the main conditions.
We will explore heterogeneity in responses based on participants' strength of group identification, as will be measured by targeted survey items referring to both groups. We hypothesize that strong identifiers: (1) will be less likely to deviate from ingroup norms, particularly when such deviations align with the outgroup norms, and this will intensify with the visibility of their choices; (2) will be more likely to impose sanctions on ingroup norm deviators when their deviation aligns with the outgroup norm; (3) will expect ingroup members to be more likely to impose sanctions on outgroup-aligned ingroup norm deviators. We further hypothesize that these effects will be stronger on more politically charged topics, and will intensify with greater deviation from ingroup norms and greater alignment with (or movement beyond) outgroup norms.
In contrast, weak identifiers, who may be less concerned with outgroup differentiation, are likely to be more willing to deviate from ingroup norms, even in the direction of the outgroup, and less inclined to impose sanctions for such deviations.
Each participant will also be asked to complete a brief survey, which will include questions about their reasoning during the experiment, psychological measures of identity, demographics, and feedback to the researchers. We are interested in also exploring differences in behavior by risk attitudes and demographics.