Personal norms — and not only social norms — shape economic behavior

We propose a simple utility framework and design a novel two-part experiment to study the relevance of personal norms across various economic games and settings. We show that personal norms — together with social norms and monetary payoff — are highly predictive of individuals’ behavior. Moreover, they are: i) distinct from social norms across a series of economic contexts, ii) robust to an exogenous increase in the salience of social norms, and iii) complementary to social norms in predicting behavior. Our findings support personal norms as a key driver of economic behavior.