The effect of social norms estimation on

non-strategic giving: Controlling for the role

of numeric anchoring and extra monetary
prospects
Maximiliano Senci* , Brenda E. Ryan* , Natalia Gregorietti* and
Esteban Freidin*

*
Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur
(IIESS)-Universidad Nacional del Sur-CONICET

July 15, 2017

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 Abstract
Making participants estimate the prescriptive norm increases generosity
in a Dictator Game (DG). Authors have interpreted this result in terms of
Norm Focus Theory (Cialdini et al., 1990). Nonetheless, non-normative ex-
planations have not been discarded yet. We replicated the effect of prescrip-
tive norms on DG decisions and assessed whether a normative or alternative
explanations were responsible for the phenomenon First, we controlled for
the incentive present in the normative estimation exercise by having con-
ditions with (SN) and without (SN_WO) monetary incentives for accurate
guesses. These conditions were contrasted against a baseline control without
any estimation before the DG decision. Second, we tested for a potential
numeric anchoring effect of the estimation exercise by having a condition
(SN_100) in which the estimation exercise was predicted, by the anchoring
hypothesis, to lead to more selfish choices than the baseline. Results showed
higher generosity than the baseline in all conditions. This replicates the
original findings even in the condition in which the normative exercise was
non-incentivized and in the condition in which anchoring predicted greedier
decisions. We conclude that the Norm Focus interpretation was supported
with added rigor, and we discuss the generalizability and practical relevance
of these findings.
Keywords: prescriptive norm; Dictator Game; generosity; pro-sociality;
behavioral insight; nudge
PsycINFO code: 3020
JEL codes: D31; D33; D62; D63; D64; Z130

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 1. Introduction

The socio-psychological literature on social norms makes the distinction be-

tween descriptive and injunctive (or prescriptive) norms (Cialdini & Gold-
stein, 2004; Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2010). These categories refer to
people’s expectations about what most people do and what people believe it
is the socially appropriate thing to do, respectively (Bicchieri, 2006). There
is ample evidence that social norms can influence a myriad of behaviors rel-
evant to vital societal issues, such as, voting (Gerber & Rogers, 2009), tax
collection (Alm, Bloomquist, & McKee, 2016), bribery (Kobis, van Prooi-
jen, Righetti, & Van Lange, 2015; Abbink, Freidin, Gangadharan, & Moro,
2016), littering (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990), cheating (Ariely, 2009),
and stealing (Cialdini, Demaine, Sagarin, Barrett, Rhoads, & Winter, 2006),
among others. These normative influences, some authors argue, are partic-
ularly effective when people’s attention can be focused towards the norm
(Cialdini et al., 1990; see also Epley & Gilovich, 1999, and Aarts, Dijkster-
huis, & Custers, 2003, for subliminal normative influences on behavior).
More recently, the study of the behavioral effects of directing peoples
attention to norms have permeated into the analysis of decision making in
economic experiments (e.g., Fehr, Kirchler, Weichbold, & Gächter, 1998;
Bicchieri & Xiao, 2009; Krupka & Weber, 2009; Raihani & McAuliffe, 2014;
Banerjee, 2016). There are a myriad of topics involving economic decisions
with social consequences in which understanding how norms affect behavior
could mean a relevant step towards improving social welfare and adequately
orienting policy decisions. Examples can go from non-strategic distribution of
resources (e.g., donations to charities), through cooperation in public goods,
to participation in bribery and corruption. We here focused on the effect of
prescriptive norms on economic decisions in a non-strategic context, namely
the Dictator Game (DG).
There are different variants of the DG, but at its core lays a unilateral
decision with payoff consequences for the decision maker and a passive as-
sociated participant. In this context, decisions can be seen as more or less
generous depending on the relative payoff each gets. Despite the selfish ra-

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tional choice involves the dictator keeping the whole pie for herself, modal
transfers are typically greater than zero, and many dictators even transfer
half the endowment (see Engel, 2011 for a meta-analysis of DG results).
Avoidance of large departures from the norm of fair share is a presumed mo-
tivation behind non-selfish decisions in the DG (Andreoni & Bernheim, 2009;
Branaz-Garza, Rodríguez-Lara, & Sánchez, 2017).
One way authors have attempted to prove the efficacy of norms in the
DG has been to use different framings of the game (attempts to vary norms
through framing has been implemented in other economic games as well; e.g.,
Liberman, Samuels, & Ross, 2004 in the Prisoners Dilemma; Leliveld, van
Dijk, & van Beest, 2008 in the Ultimatum Game; Barr & Serra, 2009, in a
Bribery Game). This approach has nonetheless produced inconsistent results
which has led authors to disagree in respect to how malleable the effect of
norms on DG decisions is (see Dreber et al., 2013; Fehr & Schmidt, 2006).
For instance, Dreber et al. (2013) presented different groups of participants
with the same DG which was called either the " Giving Game", the " Taking
Game", or the " Keeping Game", and in which the dictator have to either
move money from her envelope to the recipient envelope, or, instead, from the
recipient envelope to hers, respectively. The rationale behind these variations
was to change entitlement norms. However, they could not find evidence
of an effect of framing on decisions, despite their study counting on high
power (Dreber et al., 2013). In the same line, neither Engels (2011) meta-
analysis nor other more recent studies (Grossman & Eckel, 2015; Hauge et
al., 2015; Smith, 2015) found an effect of the giving-vs.-taking action on
DG decisions. Nevertheless, some authors did report clear effects of framing
in the DG (Oxoby & Spraggon, 2008; Krupka & Weber, 2013; Korenok,
Millner, & Razzolini, 2017). For instance, Korenok and collaborators (2017)
were successful in inducing different feelings of ownership of the endowment
by making the dictator or the recipient earn the money through a real-effort
task. Their dictators gave an average of 15% of the endowment when they
had earned it, whereas they gave an average of 40% of the endowment when
the recipient had earned it (Korenok et al., 2017).
According to Norm Focus Theory, the cognitive accessibility of normative

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information is a crucial factor determining its efficacy on behavior (Cialdini
et al., 1990). It is possible that the mentioned discrepancies of the effect of
norms in DG decisions may depend on uncontrolled variability in the salience
of the target norm relative to other applicable norms (e.g., see Dreber et al.,
2013, experiment 1) or other elements of the situation (Korenok et al., 2017;
we further treat this point in the discussion). Indeed, a different and seem-
ingly successful approach to test for the effect of norms on DG play has been
to ask participants about their normative expectations or directly provide
them with normative information before they make their decisions. Krupka
and Weber (2009) investigated the effect of making participants guess the
prescriptive norm (others’ opinion of the socially appropriate decision) be-
fore they played a variant of the DG and found that the normative estimation
led to a higher proportion of decisions for the equitable distribution than in
a control condition without the former normative exercise. Similar findings
have been obtained by Bicchieri and Xiao (2009), and Raihani and McAuliffe
(2014), though with the exogenous provision of normative information (we
discuss these two studies in the next section). Though the studies by Krupka
and Weber (2009), Bicchieri and Xiao (2009), and Raihani and McAuliffe
suggest that attended norms are indeed effective in changing DG decisions,
we have reasons to question whether their results can be taken as solid evi-
dence in favor of a normative effect.
The goal of the present study was to test the robustness of the effect of
prescriptive norms estimation on generosity in the DG. To achieve this goal,
first, we replicated Krupka and Weber’s (2009) experimental design with a
different variant of the DG and using a sample from a different country.
Second, we incorporated two conditions to clarify the interpretation of their
findings. We ran a treatment in which the norm estimation exercise prior
to the DG involved no monetary incentive. The comparison of this latter
condition with the treatment in which the norm estimation was incentivized
and with the baseline control without norm estimation allowed us to disso-
ciate whether participants were more generous because they focused on the
prescriptive norm or because they could earn more money in the session. Ad-
ditionally, the comparison between the two normative conditions sheds light

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on the effect of pecuniary incentives on the normative estimation and its
subsequent effect on decisions. Indeed, monetary payoffs have been shown to
be effective in modulating effort, processing, and performance in other cogni-
tive (Krawczyk, Gazzaley, D’Esposito, 2007; Krawcyyk & D’Esposito, 2011)
and decision-making tasks (Rosenboim, Shavit, & Cohen, 2013). If the in-
centivized normative estimation has a stronger effect on generosity, it would
suggest that the amount of cognitive effort or attention towards the norma-
tive task modulated its effect on decisions. Otherwise, it is suggestive that
norms may have a seemingly automatic none/all effect depending on simply
being cognitively active (Hasrun, Senci, Moro, & Freidin, 2017). Last, we
conceived that the estimation of the prescriptive norm could have been ef-
fective, not because it directed attention towards the norm, but because it
led participants to think of a number which anchored their subsequent deci-
sion (we further discuss the relevance of anchoring in the coming section). To
control for this, we ran a treatment in which participants had to estimate the
prescriptive norm in a $100-pie DG (where the equity norm was the $50-$50
split) before making their decision in a $50-pie DG (where the equity norm
was the $25-$25 split). If a numeric anchoring was responsible for the effect
of the normative estimation, we expected less generosity after the $100-pie
estimation exercise than after the $50-pie estimation exercise, and relative
to the baseline without the normative estimation.
In short, present results confirmed the pro-social effect of estimating the
prescriptive norm with a different variant of the DG in an Argentine sample,
and allowed us to conclude that this effect is robust to whether the normative
exercise is incentivized or not, and to an attempt to anchor the response away
from the fair share norm.
2. Relevant theoretical and empirical background
Following Cialdini and collaborators’ (1990) Theory of Normative Fo-
cus, Krupka and Weber (2009), Xiao and Bicchieri (2009), and Raihani and
McAuliffe (2014) have attempted to test the relative effects of descriptive
and prescriptive norms on non-strategic giving. For present purposes, we
refer here to their methods and results in relation to prescriptive norms and
control conditions only.

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 Krupka and Weber (2009) did a two-options DG with US university stu-
dents. In their DG protocol, participants could choose between only two
options: an equitable share ($5 to the proposer and $5 to the receiver) or a
selfish socially inefficient option ($7 for the proposer and $1 for the receiver).
They found that participants who had to guess previous participants’ opinion
about the socially appropriate option in that game later showed a higher pro-
portion of choices for the fair share than participants in the control condition
without the normative estimation exercise. Note, however, that participants
in the norm condition were incentivized to accurately estimate the prescrip-
tive norm. In this sense, Krupka and Weber (2009) varied two aspects of
their protocol between the experimental and control conditions: 1) the esti-
mation of the prescriptive norm; and 2) the possibility of making an extra
monetary earning before making the DG decision. This feature of the pro-
tocol is methodologically problematic to securely infer a normative effect,
because the other factor could have been effective.
In turn, Bicchieri and Xiao (2009), and Raihani and McAuliffe (2014)
tested whether prescriptive information had an effect on DG decisions using
US samples as well. In these studies, DGs were different from the game
used by Krupka and Weber (2009) and participants did not have to guess
others’ normative opinions but they were provided with concrete information
about others’ prescriptive beliefs (Bicchieri & Xiao, 2009) or with normative
suggestions (Raihani & McAuliffe, 2014) instead.
In the study by Bicchieri and Xiao (2009), US university students played
a DG in which proposers could offer receivers any integer amount from $1 to
$9, excluding $7 and $3. They found that participants made fairer choices in
the condition in which the normative message stated that a majority believed
that a fair share should be chosen than in the condition in which the message
stated that own earnings maximization should be pursued. This result goes in
the same direction as Krupka and Weber’s and was the outcome of a similar
protocol: Bicchieri and Xiao’s information in the fair norm condition was
similar to participants’ guesses in Krupka and Weber’s experiment. Note,
however, that Bicchieri and Xiao’s result were not compared against a no-
message baseline; therefore, one cannot know whether their normative effect

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is the consequence of the pro-social, the selfish or both norms acting together.
Raihani and McAuliffe (2014) did a $1-stake DG with a US sample using
Amazon Mechanical Turk (i.e., an out-of-the-lab online protocol). Relevant
for present purposes, they ran two treatments with messages suggesting a
minimum sharing amount of either 20% or 50% of the pie, and two control
conditions in which, before making the DG decision, participants read a
message containing the number either 20 or 50 in a statement unrelated to
social norms (i.e., whether the typical age of MTurk participants was " at
least 20" or " less than 50"). Note that the normative messages did not
refer to previous participants’ opinions unlike the protocols described before,
but were impersonal suggestions. Notwithstanding, mean donations were
higher in conditions with normative suggestions than in control treatments,
consistent with results from Krupka and Weber (2009) and Bicchieri and
Xiao (2009). However, alike Bicchieri and Xiao’s design, the controls used
by Raihani and McAuliffe (2014) may not be proper baselines against which
a normative effect could be safely inferred as we explain next.
Raihani and McAuliffe’s intention was to use the age messages to control
for a potential anchoring effect of the numbers 20 and 50. Anchoring oc-
curs when words or numbers from a previous task bias people’s subsequent
judgments or decisions. Kahneman and Tversky’s (1974) classical example
involved asking judges to estimate the number of African countries in the
UN. Participants’ estimates were lower after responding whether that num-
ber was above 10 than after responding whether that number was above 65.
Anchoring is a pervasive cognitive bias (see Furnham & Boo, 2011 for a re-
view), and has been also found in normatively charged settings such as legal
decision making (Englich, Mussweiler, & Strack, 2006). However, we cannot
know whether Raihani and McAuliffe were successful in controlling for an
anchoring effect in their experiment for two reasons. First, they did not use
a baseline control without message against which an anchoring effect could
be safely assessed. Second, results from their anchoring treatments were in
the opposite direction to their number anchoring prediction: proposers gave
significantly less money to receivers in the treatment with the " less-than-
50" message than in the treatment with the " at-least-20" message. In this

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sense, Raihani and McAuliffe inferred a normative effect by comparison with
supposedly control treatments which did not function as controls at all (i.e.,
conditions without any main effect). This compromises the ability of the
study to show any normative effect.
3. Our study
The main goal of the present study was to build on the work done by
the authors mentioned in the previous section (Krupka & Weber, 2009; Bic-
chieri & Xiao, 2009; Raihani & McAuliffe, 2014). We tested the robustness
of the prescriptive effect on DG decisions using a non-US sample, and we
incorporated two more conditions that allowed controlling for alternative
(non-normative) explanations.
First, the three studies that measured the effect of prescriptive norms
on DG decisions discussed in the previous section were done with US samples
(Krupka & Weber, 2009; Bicchieri & Xiao, 2009; Raihani & McAuliffe, 2014).
Trans-cultural economic experiments have shown extensive cross-population
variability (Henrich et al., 2005, 2006; Herrmann et al., 2008), and, especially
relevant for present purposes, cross-societal variability in DG offers have
been associated with variation in normative behaviors, such as third-party
punishment and social norms (Henrich et al., 2006). Therefore, it is not
trivial to assess the extent to which prescriptive norms affect DG decisions
in a non-US sample. We did so by using Argentine university students in
two conditions: a baseline control in which participants directly decided how
much to keep from a $50 pie, and a social norms condition (SN) in which
participants were incentivized to estimate others’ opinion about the socially
appropriate decision in the $50-pie DG before making their decision in the
game.
To have in mind, the USA and Argentina contrast in many aspects of their
normative culture, as, for example, indicated in their corresponding Corrup-
tion Perception Indexes (whereas the USA ranks 16 out of 167 countries
in transparency, Argentina ranks 107; Transparency International, 2015).
This contrast adds an interesting dimension to the present evaluation of the
prescriptive norm effect on DG decisions. Indeed, a recent cross-national
economic experiment showed that participants’ counter normative behavior

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in a dice game (cheating while reporting the outcome of a roll) was predicted
by a proxy score of the level of corruption in that society (Gächter & Schulz,
2016).
Second, the design used by Krupka and Weber (2009) inferred a pre-
scriptive normative effect from comparing conditions (prescriptive norms and
control) that differed in two aspects, one normative (the estimation exercise)
and one non-normative (the fact that the estimation exercise involved extra
monetary prospects absent in the control group). In order to make a clearer
inference of a normative effect, we incorporated a condition in which the nor-
mative estimation was not incentivized. Besides the comparison against the
baseline control, the non-incentivized condition permitted another inference:
by contrast with the incentivized condition, it allowed us testing whether
pecuniary incentives affected the normative estimation or its effect on DG
decisions. Such an effect could be expected given the evidence that monetary
incentives can affect cognitive effort and performance (Krawczyk et al., 2007;
Krawcyyk & D’Esposito, 2011; Rosenboim et al., 2013).
Third, another non-normative explanation of Krupka and Weber’s
(2009) results involves a numeric anchoring effect. This could be expected
based on the fact that thinking of irrelevant numbers has been shown to
exert an influence upon judgment and decisions in many diverse situations,
including normatively charged contexts (Englich et. al., 2006). More specif-
ically, participants that estimated that the socially appropriate decision in
the DG was the fair share or close to that, could have gotten their deci-
sion anchored by their numeric estimate, thus choosing to keep an amount
closer to the norm than controls. To test this possibility, we ran a condition
in which we directly pitted the normative effect and the number anchoring
predictions against each other. In condition SN_100, prior to making their
decisions in a $50-pie DG, participants were incentivized to estimate the pre-
scriptive norm of a $100-pie DG. Because we expected the estimated norm
to be close to a $50-$50 split in the $100-pie game, if the estimated num-
ber anchored the subsequent decision, we would see proposers keeping more
of the $50 after the $100-pie-DG normative estimation (condition SN_100)
than after $50-pie-DG normative estimation (condition SN). In contrast, if

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thinking about others’ opinion of the socially appropriate behavior played
its role upon decisions by focusing participants’ attention on the fair share
norm, we predicted decisions in condition SN_100 to be more generous than
in the baseline control and similarly so than in condition SN.
As mentioned in the introduction, Raihani and McAuliffe (2014) did a
test of the anchoring hypothesis in a similar protocol, and did not find evi-
dence to support it. Nonetheless, the present test improves that of Raihani
and McAuliffe (2014) in many respects. First, these authors changed the
wording between normative (" 20 or more" and " 50 or more") and anchoring
(" at least 20" and " less than 50") conditions, thus making them less com-
parable. In contrast, the present anchoring test relies on treatments which
only differ on the pie size of the estimation exercise prior to the DG decision.
This, jointly with counting on a proper baseline control (i.e., a treatment
without estimation or message before the DG decision), allowed us to pit the
normative and the anchoring predictions directly against each other. Last
but not least, we tested a stronger version of the anchoring hypothesis than
that tested by Raihani and McAuliffe (2014). According to the selective-
accessibility model (Strack & Mussweiler, 1997), anchoring works by making
anchor-related information more accessible in memory, and thus more readily
available to other cognitive operations. In consistency with this model, it has
been shown that conditions that lead to greater thought about the anchor
produce greater bias (Mussweiler & Strack, 1999; Bodenhausen, Gabriel, &
Lineberger, 2000). Whereas the anchor was exogenously and effortlessly pro-
vided in the study by Raihani and McAuliffe (2014), the anchoring informa-
tion was self-generated through an incentivized thought-intensive estimation
exercise in the present treatment instead.
4. Methods
4.1 Participants and task
One hundred and thirty six undergraduates participated in this experi-
ment (mean age ±1SD = 22 ±4 years old; 61% women) at the Universidad
Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in the second semester of 2015
and the first semester of 2016. Participants were recruited via e-mail invi-
tations from a pre-registered subject pool consisting of undergraduate and

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graduate students from different educational institutions in Bahía Blanca.
We ran two sessions per experimental condition, and participants took
part in only one session. Following Krupka and Weber (2009), we ran a sin-
gle condition per session to avoid contamination between conditions, espe-
cially given that verbal instructions referred to condition-specific information
to ensure understanding. Experimental sessions were always ran on either
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays at the same time of the day (12:30),
using paper and pencil, and lasted for approximately 45 min. Participants
received $25 (approx. u$s 2.5 at the time of the study) as show-up fee.
Upon arrival participants were seated in individual chairs. Sessions began
with a brief oral presentation, including basic details about the DG and how
roles were assigned. Participants were told that they would play with another
participant present in the room, but that they would not be able to iden-
tify each other during or after the session. Following the procedure used by
Krupka and Weber (2009), in all conditions, participants were informed that
they would make their DG decisions as proposers without knowing their ac-
tual role. Participants were informed that they would know the role randomly
assigned to them at the end of the session, when they received their payment.
Throughout the session, however, we emphasized that participants’ decisions
would only affect payoffs if they were later assigned the role A (proposer);
on the contrary, if they were later assigned the role B (receiver), decisions
made in role A would be inconsequential.
After that, participants received the written instructions. These instruc-
tions included every detail participants needed to know about the game (deci-
sion options, payoffs, the consequences of role assignment, etc.) and how the
session would unfold. To ensure understanding of the instructions we asked
participants to answer a series of control questions which were individually
checked before participants could proceed to make their decisions.
We used a DG different from that used by Krupka and Weber (2009).
Instead of a two-options DG, we implemented a continuous DG with a $50
pie, which the dictator had to distribute between her-self and a randomly
associated participant (she could opt for keeping any integer amount between
$0 and $50). To make the decision a participant had to write two numbers

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to fill the following sentence: " I choose to keep $_ and that B keeps $_"
We ran four independent conditions: the baseline control condition (base-
line; n=24), the social norms condition (SN; n=34), the social norms condi-
tion without incentive (SN_WO; n=36), and the social norms condition with
high anchor (SN_100; n=36). In the baseline condition, participants, first,
decided as proposers in $50-pie DG, and, second, responded a post-decision
questionnaire. In conditions SN, SN_WO, and SN_100, first, participants
were asked to accurately estimate others’ modal opinion of the socially ap-
propriate decision in the DG (for conditions SN and SN_100, this exercise
was incentivized with $25 for accuracy; in turn, participants in conditions
SN and SN_WO had to estimate the prescriptive norm in a $50-pie DG,
whereas participants in condition SN_100 had to estimate the norm in a
$100-pie DG); second, they made their decisions as proposers in the $50-pie
DG; and last, they responded the post-decision questionnaire.
The initial estimation exercise in conditions SN and SN_WO involved
guessing, for each of ten ranges of distributions (money the dictator could
keep for her/himself in increments of 5: $0-5, $6-10,. . . , $46-50), the per-
centage of previous participants who had chosen it as the socially most ap-
propriate decision range (for condition SN_100, the exercise was identical
with the exception that ranges changed in increments of $10, and the upper-
most range reached the value $100). For incentivized conditions (i.e., SN and
SN_100), if a participant’s estimation did not differ in more than three per-
centage points from the percentage of previous participants that had selected
the range that was actually chosen as the socially most appropriate, she won
a bonus payment of $25. For all social norms conditions (i.e., SN, SN_WO,
and SN_100), participants were told that the exact answer was written in a
sheet which was inside an envelope that was placed on a desk in the front,
and that it was going to be opened and showed to them at the end of the
session.
Last, the post-decision questionnaire asked for the (non-incentivized) esti-
mation of the descriptive norm in the session (estimation of others’ decisions),
each participant’s personal norm (their opinion about what was the socially
most appropriate decision in the DG), and socio-demographic information

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(gender, age, discipline of study, among others).
5. Results
As expected, participants in condition SN estimated (mean ±1 sem) that
previous participants’ opinion about the socially most appropriate option in
the DG would be close to the $25-$25 fair share (to keep $26.38 ±0.84),
which, in fact, was not significantly different from baseline participants’ re-
ported personal norm (to keep $25.29 ±0.5; Mann-Whitney U test, U=378,
Z=0.47; P=0.64). Participants in condition SN_WO also estimated the pre-
scriptive norm to be close to the $25-$25 fair share (to keep $28.35 ±0.92).
This estimation differed neither from the prescriptive estimation in condition
SN (Mann-Whitney U test, U=1110, Z=-0.55; P=0.58) nor from baseline
participants’ reported personal norm (Mann-Whitney U test, U=739, Z=-
0.88; P=0.39). To make the estimation of the prescriptive norm in condition
SN_100 comparable to that of conditions SN and SN_WO, participants’
scores were divided by two. Participants in condition SN_100 estimated that
previous participants’ opinion about the socially most appropriate option in
the DG would be close to the fair share as well. Indeed, their transformed
estimation did not significantly differ from the estimations in conditions SN
and SN_WO (Kruskal Wallis ANOVA by Ranks, χ2 =0.55, df=2, P=0.76).
Figure 1 shows the mean amount of money kept by proposers and their
estimation of other proposers’ decisions (descriptive norm) as a function of
condition. A Kruskal Wallis ANOVA by Ranks comparing the decisions
among the four conditions (SN, SN_WO, SN_100, and the baseline con-
trol) showed significant differences (χ2 =13.39, df=3, P<0.005). After the
normative estimation, participants in condition SN decided to keep a smaller
amount of money than participants in the baseline condition (Mann-Whitney
U test, U=235, Z=2.79, P<0.01). This finding replicates that of Krupka and
Weber (2009) with an Argentine sample. Therefore, similarly to US univer-
sity students, Argentine students increased their generosity in the DG when
their attention was seemingly focused on the prescriptive norm before making
a decision.
As stated in the introduction, we wondered whether participants in condi-
tion SN reacted to the estimated norm or to the incentive associated with that

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normative exercise. To control for this, we ran condition SN_WO in which
participants estimated the norm but were not incentivized to do it accurately.
In fact, DG decisions were more generous in condition SN_WO than in the
baseline control (Mann-Whitney U test, U=286.5, Z=2.228, P=0.02), and
the comparison of the amount of money kept between conditions SN_WO
and SN showed no significant differences (Mann-Whitney U test, U= 594.5,
Z=-0.90, P=0.36).
Last but not least, to safely infer a normative effect on decisions we ran a
further condition (SN_100) in which we tested for the possibility of a numeric
anchoring effect. Participants again showed greater generosity in condition
SN_100 than in the baseline condition (Mann-Whitney U test, U=233.5,
Z=2.99, P=0.002), whereas the amount of money kept in condition SN_100
did not significantly differ from decisions in conditions SN and SN_WO
(Mann-Whitney U test, U=594.5, Z=0.21, P=0.84; Mann-Whitney U test,
U=548.5, Z=1.12, P=0.26; respectively; see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Money kept by proposers (DECISION) and participants’ es-
timation of others’ decisions (ESTIMATION) in a $50-pie Dictator Game.
Whereas participants directly made their decision in the baseline condition,
in the other three conditions (SN, SN_WO, and SN_100), before deciding,
participants had to estimate previous participants’ opinion about the socially
most appropriate option in the game.
The estimation of others’ decisions followed the same pattern across
conditions as actual decisions (see Figure 1). Participants in conditions
SN, SN_WO, and SN_100 estimated others to keep less money in the DG
than participants in the baseline control (Kruskal Wallis ANOVA by Ranks,
χ2 =15.62, df=3, P<0.005; Mann-Whitney U tests, SN vs. baseline: U=256,
Z=2.25, P<0.025; SN_WO vs. baseline: U=477.5, Z=-2.92, P<0.005; and
SN_100 vs. baseline: U=820, Z=3.38, P<0.001). Participants’ estimation
of the descriptive norm did not differ among conditions SN, SN_WO, and
SN_100 (Kruskal Wallis ANOVA by Ranks, χ2 =1.44, df=2, P=0.49).
To check for the robustness of present decision results, we did a multiple
(OLS) regression with the decision (money kept) in the DG as dependent
variable and several factors as predictors (see Table 1). We confirmed the

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generosity effect of thinking about the prescriptive norm, and we found it
to be robust to the addition of several controls such as increased monetary
prospects, the presence of a possible high numeric anchor, gender, age, disci-
pline, the number of known participants in the session, and previous partici-
pation in economic experiments. According to regression coefficients in Table
1, thinking about the prescriptive norm before the decision led to an average
of $4 of extra generosity. In addition, the regression showed that previous
participation in economic experiments was associated with more selfish de-
cisions: for each previous participation, participants were on average almost
$2 greedier).
Table 1. Multiple (OLS) regression of decisions in the DG. Prescrip-
tive_Estimation, Monetary_Prospects, and Anchoring are dummies that
test for the effects of having the estimation exercise before the DG decision
(1=yes; 0=no), an increased monetary prospect due to the incentivized es-
timation exercise (1=yes; 0=no), and a higher numeric anchor (1=SN_100;
0=for the remaining conditions). Gender: 1=female; Discipline: 1=eco-
nomics, business administration and accountancy; Known_participants: num-
ber of known participants in the session; Previous_participation: number of

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previous participation in economic experiments.

* P≤0.05; Φ P<0.10.
6. Discussion
In this study, we replicated the finding that focusing participants’ atten-
tion on prescriptive norms increased generosity in the DG (Krupka & Weber,
2009; Bicchieri & Xiao, 2009; Raihani & McAuliffe, 2014). Previous reports
of this effect were, however, inconclusive because of their lack of controls. Au-
thors had claimed a normative effect while their results could be explained
in non-normative terms (see the introduction for details and references).
Here we implemented a condition in which the normative estimation ex-
ercise was not incentivized, and compared DG decisions in this condition
against a condition in which correct normative guesses were monetarily re-
warded and a baseline control without any prior estimation exercise. We
found that generosity in both conditions with normative exercises prior to
the DG was higher than in the baseline. This result allows us to state that
the effect of increased generosity caused by the normative exercise was not
an artifact of the extra monetary prospects associated with the estimation
exercise. Meanwhile, we did not find evidence that conditions with normative
exercises (incentivized or not) prior to the decision differ among each other.
This may suggest that the effect of norms on decisions was not modulated

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by the estimation exercise being incentivized. This comparison and lack of
significant difference between incentivized and non-incentivized conditions,
however, needs to be interpreted with caution given the small sample size
used.
In turn, we ran a condition (SN_100) in which the normative exercise
prior to the decision involved guessing others’ opinion about the appropri-
ate behavior in a DG with a pie ($100) that doubled the size of the pie to
be shared in the decision DG ($50). The comparison of condition SN_100
against the baseline condition showed that generosity was greater in the for-
mer, thus suggesting that the numeric anchor in the estimation exercise was
not effective. Consistent with this conclusion is the lack of difference in gen-
erosity between condition SN_100 and the condition in which the guessing
exercise was done with the $50-pie DG (SN). All in all, conditions SN_100
and SN presented similar levels of generosity, both higher than the baseline.
This result confirms that thinking about the fair share norm underlay par-
ticipants’ increased generosity. Nonetheless, as suggested by an anonymous
reviewer, an uncontrolled factor in this experiment was that participants
were promised $25 for an accurate normative estimation in conditions SN
and SN_100; this prize could have anchored down the decision in condition
SN_100. There is, however, no evidence that the $25 prize functioned as an
anchor. First, conditions with and without that reward (SN and SN_WO,
respectively) both showed more generosity than the baseline and did not sig-
nificantly differ between each other. Second, given that the $25 prize was the
same in conditions SN and SN_100, if the number thought in the estima-
tion exercise would have been effective in anchoring the decision (the tested
hypothesis), we should have been able to detect it as a difference between
conditions SN and SN_100, which we did not find. Indeed, whereas the me-
dian was exactly the same in these two conditions, the mean of money kept
by the dictator was slightly lower in condition SN_100 than in condition SN,
contrary to the anchoring prediction.
In sum, we are able to conclude, with added rigor, that focusing par-
ticipants on the prescriptive norm increases generosity through a normative
effect. Therefore, the Norm Focus interpretation of the effect of prescrip-

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tive norms on non-strategic giving was supported after controlling for non-
normative explanations. As mentioned in the introduction, the confirmation
of the relevance of Norm Focus Theory (Cialdini et al., 1990) to interpret
DG decisions may help explaining unaccounted differences in DG protocols
in terms of the differential salience of applicable norms. More specifically,
authors disagree in terms of how malleable the effect of norms on DG de-
cisions is based on mixed results of framing effects (Fehr & Schmidt, 2006;
Engel, 2011; Dreber et al., 2013). Present results showed that participants
strongly agreed on the prescriptive norm in an abstractly framed DG (see
also Korenok et al., 2017 for further evidence of norms on DG decisions). We
suggest that it could be useful to rely on the present protocol (prescriptive
normative estimation prior to the decision) to check whether uncontrolled
variability in the attended norms is behind inconsistent findings with the
Taking-vs.-Giving framing.
In addition to replicating Krupka and Weber’s (2009) finding with added
rigor, we did so with university students from Argentina, whereas previous
studies had shown this effect on US samples only (Krupka & Weber, 2009;
Bicchieri & Xiao, 2009; Raihani & McAuliffe, 2014). Despite differences be-
tween US and Argentine social norms (e.g., see Transparency International,
2015 for differences in the levels of perceived corruption), we found a con-
sistent normative effect in these two societies. This result might be seen as
somehow unexpected given trans-cultural studies showing that DG decisions
in a society were positively associated with normative behaviors in the lab as
well as with societal norms (Henrich et al., 2006). Nonetheless, the similarity
between cultures detected here is only qualitative. Both in the US and in
Argentina, reminders of the prescriptive norm increased generosity; however,
we cannot easily compare the degree to which generosity was increased in
different studies because of several methodological differences among them
(Krupka & Weber, 2009; Bicchieri & Xiao, 2009; Raihani & McAuliffe, 2014;
see the introduction for details).
In any case, the robustness of the effect of prescriptive norms on eco-
nomic behavior might serve as a behavioral insight to address other issues
of public interest (Sousa Lourenço, Ciriolo, Rafael Almeida, & Troussard,

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2016). Nonetheless, Fehr and Schmidt (2006) advice researchers to be care-
ful about generalizing the effects found in DGs to other games or contexts
given the relative sensitivity of DG decisions to many different factors. In-
deed, the effect of prescriptive norms on economic decisions has been tested
in some games beyond the DG. For instance, Dal Bó & Dal Bó (2014) found
sustained higher contributions in a two-person public goods game with pun-
ishment after a message with normative content (the golden rule) relative to a
no-message control. This result is consistent with those found in DGs by Bic-
chieri and Xiao (2009) and Raihani and McAuliffe (2014) which we discussed
in the introduction. In turn, D’Adda, Drouvelis, and Nosenzo (2016) have re-
cently tested the effect of prescriptive norm estimation in a collusive Bribery
Game (BG) done at the University of Birmingham, UK. Their procedure
was closer to the present experiment and that of Krupka and Weber (2009)
than to that of Bicchieri and Xiao (2009), Raihani and McAuliffe (2014) or
Dal Bó and Dal Bó (2014), because the norm had to be estimated instead
of being exogenously provided. In D’Adda et al.’s (2016) study, bribery was,
however, not affected by whether the norm estimation occurred before or
after bribery decisions. In addition, another simple one-shot collusive BG
done in Argentina, alike D’Adda et al.’s (2016), did not report evidence of
any effect of prescriptive norms estimation on bribery either (Abbink et al.,
2016).
Why would the effect of norm estimation be robust in variations of the
DG, whereas have no effect in BGs? We do not have a definitive answer
to this question, but we discuss several possibilities. First, it could be the
case that the effect of prescriptive norms has a more prominent effect in
non-strategic than in strategic contexts. This could be the case if strategic
considerations overshadow the effect of norms. However, as present results
showed, focusing attention on norms not only changed participants’ behavior
but also affected participants’ beliefs about others’ behavior. Based on this
finding, we should expect an effect of prescriptive norms on strategic consid-
erations as well, which is, in fact, what Dal Bó and Dal Bó’s (2014) results in
two-person public goods games suggest. (As pointed out by an anonymous
reviewer, however, in the present experiment, empirical estimations may have

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simply followed from participants’ own decisions in the game; hence, we can-
not know from present data whether thinking about the prescriptive norm
actually affected those empirical estimations). Second, there could be a dif-
ference in the level of consensus between DG norms and norms in the BG
(Rauhut & Winter, 2010). Maybe, the simplicity of the DG leads to greater
agreement in terms of what represents a socially appropriate behavior in
that context (i.e., the fair share norm). If that were the case, we could ex-
pect a stronger effect of norms in the DG than in the BG simply because
of a more homogeneous aggregated outcome in the former than in the latter
game. However, the evidence does not support this view either. According to
results from the study by D’Adda and collaborators (2016), more than 90%
of participants in their BG evaluated bribery (offer or acceptance) as socially
inappropriate, thus suggesting a high level of normative consensus. Last, we
consider the possibility that the norm may be more salient in the BG than
in the DG. This could be the case because the BGs used by D’Adda et al.
(2016) and by Abbink et al. (2016) both relied on a loaded frame with words
that directly or indirectly referred to bribery (e.g., " bribe" in D’Adda et al.,
2016; " private payment" in Abbink et al., 2016). In this sense, even when
participants were not asked to think about the prescriptive norm in these
BGs, the mere frame of the games could have focused participants’ attention
on normative considerations. This could explain the absence of difference in
bribery decisions between conditions with and without a normative estima-
tion exercise (D’Adda et al., 2016; Abbink et al., 2016). To what extent this
conditions the applicability of Norm Focus Theory to deter bribery remains
an open issue (see also Hasrun et al., 2017).
To finish, we would like to highlight the potential relevance of present and
related findings as behavioral insights that may contribute to the design of
public policies (see Sousa et al., 2016). Previous lab research on DGs (e.g.,
Haley & Fessler, 2005) has proved useful in delineating successful strategies
to apply in the field (Ernest-Jones, Nettle, & Bateson, 2011; Nettle, Nott,
& Bateson, 2012). This path towards real-world applications requires more
research, both in the lab and in the field, to acknowledge the conditions under
which the effect of focusing people’s attention to relevant norms actually

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affects their behavior in a pro-social manner. In this sense, the present
effect of prescriptive norms on generosity should be tested on the field, for
example, on posters or signs with prescriptive information to instigate people
to donate to charities or other institutions. Relevant as well is the extent
to which a similar strategy could work on a different behavioral context.
Recent lab research suggests that present findings conceptually replicate in a
different game: the provision of information about rights and duties (detailed
prescriptive norms) contributed to deterring bribery (Hasrun et al., 2017).
All in all, at the moment, the relevance of norms in economic behavior seems
unquestionable, and the use of this knowledge for social causes could prove
vital.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Fabricio Carballo for his help in collecting data in
some of the sessions. This work was supported by The Argentine Council of
Science and Technology (Spanish acronym: CONICET; grant number PIP
2014-2016 №112-201301-00600-CO) and The Argentine Agency of Science
and Technology Promotion (Grant code: PICT 2013-1582).
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