Social norms have long been recognized as an important factor in curtailing antisocial behavior, and stricter prosocial norms are commonly associated with increased prosocial behavior. In this study, we provide evidence that very strict prosocial norms can have a perverse negative relationship with prosocial behavior. In laboratory experiments conducted in 10 countries across 5 continents, we measured the level of honest behavior and elicited injunctive norms of honesty. We find that individuals who hold very strict norms (i.e., those who perceive a small lie to be as socially unacceptable as a large lie) are more likely to lie to the maximal extent possible. This finding is consistent with a simple behavioral rationale. If the perceived norm does not differentiate between the severity of a lie, lying to the full extent is optimal for a norm violator since it maximizes the financial gain, while the perceived costs of the norm violation are unchanged. We show that the relation between very strict prosocial norms and high levels of rule violations generalizes to civic norms related to common moral dilemmas, such as tax evasion, cheating on government benefits, and fare dodging on public transportation. Those with very strict attitudes toward civic norms are more likely to lie to the maximal extent possible. A similar relation holds across countries. Countries with a larger fraction of people with very strict attitudes toward civic norms have a higher society-level prevalence of rule violations.

The Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale is a popular tool to measure interpersonal closeness that is increasingly being used in economics. We develop and validate a continuous version of the IOS scale. This Continuous IOS scale gives a finer measure and addresses the reluctance of subjects to report low scores on the standard IOS scale. We also propose a version of the standard IOS scale that meets its original design features. Our IOS scales are easy-to-use, well-documented, standardised, and available at https://github.com/geoffreycastillo/ios-js.

In this paper, we compare behavior in the dictator, ultimatum, and public goods games before and during the Gezi Park protests in laboratory experiments conducted in Türkiye. In May 2013, protests began against the proposed destruction of Gezi Park—one of the few remaining green spaces in Istanbul’s city center—for the construction of a shopping mall. Quickly spreading across Türkiye, many ordinary citizens participated in the protests in the following weeks. The collective action demonstrated in these protests is similar to the types of behavior economists study in games where individuals accept personal costs for the benefit of others. We find that participants in the protests were just as likely to choose the equal payoff option as it increased in value in the modified dictator game, punish uncooperative behavior in the ultimatum game, and reward cooperative behavior in the public goods game as those who participated in the experiments before the protests. This was true of the behavior of the nonparticipants in the protests in the ultimatum and public goods games. In contrast, nonparticipants in the protests were less willing to forgo the selfish payoff option for their coplayer’s benefit in the modified dictator game.