2017 Florence-Konstanz joint interdisciplinary workshop on Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences

The aim of the workshop - which is co-organized by the Graduate School of Decision Sciences (GSDS) of the University of Konstanz (Germany), the Thurgau Institute of Economics (TWI), the Behavioural and Experimental Economics Lab (BEELab) and the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Florence (Italy) - is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of various themes concerning social norms in multi-ethnic societies. Social norms attract wide interest in many fields of social sciences, and appear to be highly relevant in societies that include groups having different, possibly conflicting, norms. The norms adopted by each group co-evolve over time and are affected by migration flows which can substantially alter the relative size of groups.

A variety of issues arise in this setting. What types of behaviour can be defined as social norms? Why do people abide by norms? How can norms be enforced? How do they differ between cultures? How do people deal with conflicting norms? How do they evolve in a world of increasing exchange? These are just some among many possible questions that already have received attention from disciplines such as economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Such disciplines have so far developed different theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches to the topic and their findings largely persist isolated. This workshop aims at bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to foster an exchange on the common insights as well as to find pathways to integrate these separated approaches more closely.