Moral reminders can be a powerful drivers of behavior change. Existing literature also suggests that the most compelling moral appeals have a number of good ingredients, including targeted framing, timing and saliency of the message, and social norm interventions. Our study builds on this line of research to inquire: is dissemination of normative information powerful in itself? Or does the medium through which one disseminates information have a distinct upshot on eliciting desired behavior? To address these questions, we designed an experimental study to evaluate the impact of social norms and communication media on dishonesty. Our research examined whether who communicates a social norm (male vs female), and how the social norm is communicated (written vs audio vs visual instructions) have any impact on cheating behavior. We recruited 1725 participants on Amazon’s Mturk and they were presented with a roll-a-die task. In our two-by-three between subjects design, the treatment messages varied along two dimensions: 1) Whether the social norm conveyed was normative or empirical (respectively: Most people do not cheat/ Most people believe one should not cheat) and 2) whether the message was conveyed in written (message on their screen), audio (audio instructions via either male or female voice) or visual form (an image).

Our study also points at the realisation that moral gender disparities might be accentuated by specific communication media, notably visuals. Secondly, people who believed that the majority of other participants engaged in cheating behavior, were more likely to cheat, thus conforming to their perceived social norm.Thirdly, when we further analysed the data to observe whether the gender of the audio condition influences cheating, we find that the most effective audio treatment is one that combines empirical norms and female voice. Counterintuitively, treatments with a female voice had a lower cheating rate than a male voice, serving as a more powerful motivation for ethical behavior (difference of about 3 percentage points). We observe that this finding has support in the real-world when we think about navigation systems that default to female voice such as Siri or Google's GPS satellite systems. Currently, we are working on isolating this gender effect in audio treatments. We also find other interesting results on participant’s dispositions to risk-taking, honesty and norm perceptions.

Overall, this research proposes that the success or failure of a moral appeal - sometimes - is not directly proportional to the way in which the message is disseminated. Indeed, social norm interventions need to be activated, made salient and delivered in the right context, but we also speculate the “who” communicating the norm may equally matter. In conclusion, we hope these results offer a unique perspective on the vividness of different media on norms, especially as we think about designing large-scale behavior change initiatives.