Norm Pluralism, Tolerance, and Social Sanctions in a Divided World: Investigating Political Polarization through an Economist’s Lens

Lately, the causes and effects of political polarization have received much attention across behavioral science and related disciplines. In this talk, I’ll present how behavioral economists can advance the knowledge using innovative methods. Drawing on a series of recent studies, I aim to offer insights into the following two questions:

1. Can we develop new methods and tools to measure the existing norm-pluralism (= coexistence of possibly competing social norms) to better understand how we follow and enforce norms in polarized environments?
   This will be the core of my talk. Here, I will mostly rely on two experimental projects jointly developed with Kimbrough, Panizza & Vostroknutov, one of which introduces the method (link, preprint) and the other one validates and applies the method to various contentious topics in the U.S. (link, just out in PNAS Nexus).
2. How do political shocks (like the outcome of a close 2024 U.S. presidential election) shift the perceptions of fairness and the need for norm enforcement in social interactions?
   Here, I will briefly preview insights from a new manuscript (joint with Gelfand, Hochleitner & Sonderegger) in which we leveraged the election to study fairness and norm perceptions: link