ArticleNature communications2021
Evidence from a long-term experiment that collective risks change social norms and promote cooperation.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intragroup Judgements of Norm Violators Under the Threat of COVID-19.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Individual locomotor bias drives counterclockwise motion in pedestrian crowds.Nature communications · 2026Article
- From toxicity to conformity: adaptive user behavior to social norms in Telegram communities.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Effects of fundamental social motives on environmental variation of compliance during pandemics.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- How risk communication shapes individual response to climate change: an experimental study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- An interdisciplinary linked-lives approach to individual differences in social behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- The chronospatial revolution in psychology.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Humans program artificial delegates to accurately solve collective-risk dilemmas but lack precision.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A norm about harvest division is maintained by a desire to follow tradition, not by social policing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The effect of trusting contexts in social dilemmas with collective and individual solutions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Emergence of cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's dilemma through Discriminatory and Samaritan AIs.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Evidence from 43 countries that disease leaves cultures unchanged in the short-term.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Risk, sanctions and norm change: the formation and decay of social distancing norms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Modelling social norms: an integration of the norm-utility approach with beliefs dynamics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Changes in social norms during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic across 43 countries.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Assessing the effects of pandemic risk on cooperation and social norms using a before-after Covid-19 comparison in two long-term experiments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A newly detected bias in self-evaluation.PloS one · 2024Article
- Co-evolution of behaviour and beliefs in social dilemmas: estimating material, social, cognitive and cultural determinants.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Distinguishing fast change in social norms and slow change in personal norms in cooperative decision-making.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Despite their relevance, how norms shape cooperation among strangers remains insufficiently understood. Influential theories also suggest that the level of threat faced by different societies plays a key role in the strength of the norms that cultures evolve. Still little causal evidence has been collected. Here we deal with this dual challenge using a 30-day collective-risk social dilemma experiment to measure norm change in a controlled setting. We ask whether a looming risk of collective loss increases the strength of cooperative social norms that may avert it. We find that social norms predict cooperation, causally affect behavior, and that higher risk leads to stronger social norms that are more resistant to erosion when the risk changes. Taken together, our results demonstrate the causal effect of social norms in promoting cooperation and their role in making behavior resilient in the face of exogenous change.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.