"Culture, Mobility, and the Selection of Norm Enforcement Strategies"

Rewards and punishments are critical in forming and maintaining social norms. Whereas research has clearly demonstrated that mobility and culture affect choices to monetarily reward and punish, less is known about how mobility and culture affect non-monetary norm enforcement strategies. Experiment 1 tests enforcement via social inclusion and exclusion and demonstrates a significantly different pattern of effects from previous monetary findings, with high mobility individuals punishing more but rewarding less than low mobility individuals. Experiment 2 tests enforcement via reporting to an authority and finds that, in contrast to Experiment 1, high mobility individuals punish less but reward more than low mobility individuals. Experiment 3 compares reactions of Americans (high mobility) versus Koreans (low mobility) and largely replicates the previous experiments' patterns of results cross-culturally. This paper illustrates critical boundary conditions for past findings and implications for the development...