Human behavior is frequently guided by social and moral norms; in fact, no societies, no social groups could exist without norms. However, there are few cognitive science approaches to this central phenomenon of norms. While there has been some progress in developing formal representations of norm systems (e.g., deontological approaches), we do not yet know basic properties of human norms: how ...

This article supports the position that the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) articulates a prohibition of capital punishment of juveniles that now must be considered a norm of jus cogens. The article provides statistics and trends regarding juveniles who commit capital crimes and describes how the U.S. justice system handles such juveniles, including Eighth Amendm...

This paper analyses competition of moral norms and institutions in a society where a fixed share of people unconditionally complies with norms and the remaining people act selfishly. Whether a person is a norm-complier or selfish is private knowledge. A model of voting-by-feet shows that those norms and institutions arise that maximize expected utility of norm-compliers, taking into account sel...

Using a theory of planned behavior (TPB) perspective, individual intentions to register and discuss the organ donation decision with significant others were examined. In addition to standard TPB variables (attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control [PBC]), selfidentity and moral norm were incorporated into the TPB as predictors. Australian university students (N = 303) complete...

It is today generally acknowledged that social norms are important for moral hazard in social insurance systems. In this paper we study whether local variation in sickness absence can be explained by local variation in norms concerning benefit dependency – formed by social interaction on the neighborhood level. A well known methodological problem in analyses of this issue is how to disentangle ...

The term 'The Divine Command Theory of Ethics' is similar to 'The Ontological Argument' in that there is no unique entity deserving of that title. Rather, there is a multiplicity of theories, each of which is appropriately taken to be a divine command theory. The strongest versions are, if not the finest, at least definist. That is, according to these versions moral predicates, such as 'is obli...

We analyze the e¤ects of family ties on the incentives for production of e¤ort, where family ties are de…ned as a mixture of true and coerced altruism between family members. We model families as pairs of siblings. Each sibling exerts e¤ort in order to obtain output under uncertainty. A social norm dictates that a sibling with a high output must share a speci…ed amount of this output with his s...

In this paper we study the social norms to abstain from cheating on the state via benefit fraud and tax evasion. We interpret these norms (called benefit morale and tax morale) as moral goods, and derive testable hypotheses on whether their demand is determined by prices. Employing a large survey data set from OECD-member countries we provide robust evidence that the demand responds to price pr...

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social choices over egoistic ones. Particularly important, because cheap and easy to implement, are those mecha...

Developing countries, in particular the least developed ones, probably have more to learn from social policies in Europe during the early 20 century than from the elaborate welfare-state arrangements after World War II. In addition to macroeconomic growth and stability, the main ambitions must be to fight human deprivation, including illiteracy, malnutrition, poor access to water and sanitation...