【题  目】Mutual Knowledge of Social Norms and Political Activism

【时  间】2024年3月27日（星期三），12:30-14:00

【地  点】后主楼1722

【主讲人】Lukas Hensel 助理教授（北京大学光华管理学院）

【主持人】何浩然 教授（北京师范大学经济与工商管理学院）

摘要：Social norms are important drivers of human behavior. Problematically, when individuals hold incorrect beliefs about others' opinions, a norm may be sustained even if a majority is against it (pluralistic ignorance). However, it may not be sufficient to correct such misperceptions as citizens may continue to believe that others do not share the updated beliefs. In this case, creating mutual knowledge about social norms may be necessary to induce behavioral change.  We implement a field experiment in Kyrgyzstan to test this hypothesis. We vary i) whether women are provided with information on high social support for female political engagement, and ii) whether women are informed that this information is also provided to other women ("mutual knowledge"). We find that providing information about high societal support has no effect on women's political engagement. However, women become less engaged when we also experimentally create mutual knowledge about the social norm opposing female engagement. Yet, there is no positive effect on female engagement when providing mutual knowledge about high social support. Using vignette experiments, we show that the asymmetry arises because women fear community punishment---in case they are more active than socially desired---more so than potential community praise when they become active when more engagement is desired.

报告人简介：

Lukas Hensel is an Assistant Professor in Economics at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He works on topics in health economics, behavioral political economy, and development economics. His work is tied together by my focus on the role of limited information, beliefs, and social interaction for the behavior of actors in markets and institutions. He aspires to using large-scale randomized field experiments to estimate the causal impact of theory-motivated interventions that provide clear evidence on policy-relevant parameters. He published in journals such as Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Behavior and Organization, and in top political science journals.