Experimenting with Social Norms is the fruit of collaboration among 2 dozen economists and anthropologists. It presents results from the second phase of experimental work that started in 1997 at UCLA. The first phase gave rise to several publications, including Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small Scale Society [Henrich et al. 2004]. The book consists of Part I (Theory, Methods and Comparative Analysis) and Part II, which presents empirical results from each society studied in Chapters 6-18, and is available online only. Whereas the first phase documented the prevalence of fairness as a social norm across cultures, the second aims at testing both the robustness of this result and the internalization of social norms by using experiments involving three games instead of one (as in the first phase). The theoretical underpinning of this work is a co-evolutionary approach to social norms and motivations, where norms are viewed as delineating social expectations regarding behavior, and thereby come to be part of individual motivations and preferences.
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