Norm Enforcement on Minorities: Empirical and Experimental Evidence from Traffic Violations

Abstract

Rule compliance is an important way to achieve and sustain cooperation in large-scale societies. In this study, we investigate the impact of social identity on rule following behavior. First, using large-scale traffic violation data from a major city in China, we empirically showed that traffic violations are significantly less severe when individuals drive in foreign cities other than the local city where the car is registered, a phenomenon that we described as the “compliance minority” effect. We next conducted a laboratory experiment with a street-crossing task, to further investigate the key drivers behind the compliance minority phenomenon. We found that participants exhibit more rule compliance when identifying as an outgroup minority than a local majority only when both observability and social sanctions are at play. Participants form the prior belief that being part of a minority in the community is associated with a higher chance of being monitored and punished than when they are part of the local majority, which is consistent with the posterior observations. Further evidence from a survey experiment showed that a minority identity with salient observability is associated with higher compliance with social norms. Our results suggest that majorities can enforce augmented social norms on minority groups through an interplay of observability and punishment, which could lead to unintended consequences of local privilege that hamper the equality and efficiency of society.

Keywords: Norm compliance; Social identity; Traffic violation; Compliance minority

JEL Classification: D01; C92