Incentivizing social norm elicitation

Abstract Across three studies involving more than 5,000 participants, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of incentivizing responses in the Krupka-Weber norm elicitation task. We consider both the potential benefits of incentivization (higher response quality and mitigation of response biases) and its possible drawbacks (distortion of responses in the direction of norm-unrelated focal points and materialistic values). We find no evidence of undesirable effects of incentives. While we report only modest improvements in response quality, we also show that incentives effectively mitigate response biases that arise when participants’ self-serving motivations conflict with accurate responding.