Exogenous social norms shift fisheries compliance under inadequate enforcement: Insights from a novel experiment

Compliance with rules and laws is critical to societal function and may be driven more by social pressures than enforcement penalties. In conservation, many protected areas closed to hunting and fishing have been rendered ineffective due to inadequate compliance. Here, we explore the role of social norms in compliance decisions by using a novel experimental game to study real anglers' decisions to fish ‘illegally’ in a simulated marine protected area (MPA) or ‘legally’ in an open access fishing area. We demonstrate that a descriptive social norm, exogenously created by computer confederates posing as other players, can increase or decrease participant compliance over time. Specifically, participants conform to confederate-driven social norms even though these are irrelevant to their final payouts. Building on past common pool resource games studying cooperation as a viable long-term strategy in fisheries, we demonstrate how cooperative (or non-cooperative) behaviors can be causally driven by conformity to group norms. Additionally, our analysis of participants' compliance decisions reveals that normative influence accumulates over time, such that each rulebreaker observed over time makes individuals ∼2.8% more likely to eventually break the rules themselves (Est = 0.037, p = 0.0069). The influence of catch and fines, by comparison, dissipates much more quickly. Noncompliance decreases markedly following big catches, even more so than after fines for fishing the protected area. Potential feedbacks between the observed catch effect, normative effects, and MPA spillover could merit further investigation.