A sociological perspective on measuring social norms by means of strategy method experiments

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences. While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologists rather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suffer from distinct weaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in the measurement of more complex elements, such as the conditionality or the level of consensus of social norms. Surveys, on the other, lack the ability to measure actual behavior. This paper argues that the so-called “strategy ∗This paper benefitted from comments made by Dirk Helbing regarding the design of the experiment and by Werner Güth on an earlier version of this paper. Assistance of Jana Adler and Isabel Kuroczka in conducting the experiment is gratefully appreciated. We thank Thomas Voss and the University of Leipzig for providing the experimental infrastructure and the ETH Zürich Competence Center ’Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems’ (CCSS) through ETH Research Grant CH1-01-08-2 and the ETH Foundation for partial support. 1 Jena Economic Research Papers 2009 054