Descriptive norms for me, injunctive norms for you: Using norms to explain the risk gap

Abstract

People are more likely to rely on descriptive norms (i.e., what their peers are doing) when deciding whether to take a risk themselves than when deciding whether to recommend others to take a risk. We proposed and found that people also attend to normative information when making risk recommendations to others, but in this case they attend to a different type of normative information — injunctive norms (i.e., whether their peers approve of this behavior). Descriptive norm plays a bigger role in influencing people’s own decisions, whereas injunctive norm plays a bigger role in influencing people’s recommendations to others. This research demonstrates the importance of differentiating descriptive versus injunctive norms in risky decision-making and provides further evidence that perceived norms significantly influence risky decision-making.

Keywords

• risk
• decision-making
• social norm
• descriptive norm
• injunctive norm