IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-05556195.html

Shaping societal norms: Experimental evidence on the normative impact of free speech law

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel L. Chen

    (TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Susan Fillin-Yeh

    (Charles River Associates Inc, Boston)

Abstract

Do laws shape values? We explore this question by testing a model of law and norms within a legal realm − U.S. obscenity laws − where economic incentives are not the primary drivers of social change. Our randomized experiment had data entry workers transcribe news reports of either progressive or conservative legal decisions. This design allowed us to observe the impact of these laws on attitudes and norms. We found that exposure to progressive legal decisions resulted in the liberalization of sexual attitudes and a shift in norm perceptions, though not in self-reported behavior. These findings underscore the expressive power of law, with significant implications for decision-making in social and political settings, as well as for the empirical predictions of theoretical models within these domains.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel L. Chen & Susan Fillin-Yeh, 2025. "Shaping societal norms: Experimental evidence on the normative impact of free speech law," Post-Print hal-05556195, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05556195
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2025.102799
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05556195. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.