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Appeals to Social Norms and Taxpayer Compliance
Author(s) -
Alm James,
Schulze William D.,
Bose Carrie,
Yan Jubo
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/soej.12374
Subject(s) - social norms approach , compliance (psychology) , normative , norm (philosophy) , psychology , social psychology , normative social influence , taxpayer , conformity , test (biology) , political science , law , paleontology , biology
We use laboratory experiments to examine the impact of appeals to social norms on the compliance decisions of individuals. We test the effects of two main types of social norms: “descriptive norms,” or the type of behavior that is typical or most frequently enacted, and “injunctive norms,” or the type of behavior that “constitutes morally approved and disapproved conduct”. In addition, for injunctive norms, we introduce approval‐framed and disapproval‐framed injunctive norm messages. Our results indicate that normative appeals generally have a modest and positive impact on tax compliance, if not always statistically significant. The magnitude of both approval‐ and disapproval‐framed injunctive norm messages is an increase of around 2% in reported taxes.