Framing Norms and Beliefs: Experimental Approaches to Tax Compliance, Gender Identity, Religious Behavior, and Risk-Taking.

The doctoral thesis consists of four chapters. The first is a laboratory experiment investigating the link between tax evasion and social norms. The second chapter conducts another lab experiment examining gender preconceptions and misrepresentation in strategic contexts. In the third chapter, I use questionnaire data to determine if believing in powerful gods encourages pro-social behavior and whether belief in vengeful gods motivates delegated punishment. Finally, the fourth chapter investigates how risk influences people's decisions to engage in pro-social conduct using data from a lab experiment. One goal connects my PhD thesis: understanding how external elements like norms, stereotypes, beliefs, and risk influence individual decision-making in social circumstances. The first chapter investigates how social norms influence tax evasion behavior, demonstrating the impact of social expectations on individual choices. We use the "opinion-matching approach" to experimentally investigate the effects of generated honest vs. dishonest and empirical vs. normative expectations. The results suggest that compliance is connected with a subjective inclination to comply with rules generally and that normative expectations—rather than empirical— affect people's conduct more substantially. Finally, positive empirical signals can have a "boomerang effect" and boost tax evasion. In addition to confirming certain well-established findings from prior research, our findings highlight the relationship between tax compliance and people's sensitivity to various social norms. The second chapter examines how gender stereotypes influence misrepresentation in strategic encounters, emphasizing how societal perceptions can sway decision-making. via a lab experiment, we investigated how gender identity is a strategic signal in strategic complements and substitute game settings, allowing individuals to represent themselves via avatars. Contrary to predictions, individuals altered their self-representation depending on perceived dominance rather than gender, which aligned with strategic differences. Furthermore, we saw individuals adapting to the representations of others, with a focus on perceived dominance. Our findings underscore the dynamic character of social relationships and the relationship between strategic choice and gender self-representation. In the third chapter, I broaden my research to religious beliefs, looking at how beliefs in deities influence pro-social actions and penalty delegation, exposing the relevance of moral frameworks in guiding conduct. Using survey data from the United States, we examine trusting institutions, generalized trust, and diverse religious beliefs. Our primary focus is individual reactions to conventional conformity, altruistic punishment, and individual problem-solving abilities (coping). We discovered that people with a strong religious faith (who invest much time in religion) are likelier to penalize those who do not follow the norms. In contrast, the link with believing whether or not it is right to punish individuals who break the rules is tempered by non-religious characteristics. The fourth chapter connects these notions by examining how risk influences decisions to engage in prosocial conduct, demonstrating how external constraints, whether social, moral, or situational, impact human behavior. We discovered an altruistic explanation for risk in the prosocial risk-taking group, but only among men. In contrast, women appear to have an excuse not to donate, causing them to risk less.