Negative Descriptive Social Norms and Political Action: People Aren't Acting, So You Should

Individuals learn about the actions or behaviors of other people through the use of descriptive social norms. Previous work has argued that the use of negative descriptive norms (or information indicating many people are not doing something) depresses participation relative to positive descriptive norms. We show that for political actions this is not always correct. Using two experiments, we examine the willingness of individuals to take public action when these requests include either a positive or a negative descriptive norm. In the first, we invite individuals to write a local city official about city policy and in the second, we ask individuals to sign a petition advocating a specific policy at a large public university. We find that individuals are more likely to act when presented with the negative descriptive norm and that this effect stems from the anger negative descriptive norms elicit.