Thread by @JeffreyASachs

By pure serendipity, PNAS published an article last week directly relevant to the Amy Wax controversy. On a series of train platforms across Germany, unwitting bystanders watched as one actor (the enforcer) chastised another for littering.

pnas.org/content/early/…

Immediately after successfully shaming the litterer into picking up his mess, the enforcer accidentally spilled a bag of oranges onto the platform. The question is whether enforcing a social norm against littering made the bystanders more likely to help retrieve the oranges.

The catch: researchers manipulated the identity of the enforcer, so that some were visibly an immigrant/non-ethnic German and some were not.

What do you think they found?

The good news: most bystanders helped most enforcers most of the time.

The bad news: wearing a hijab made a difference, leading to less assistance.

And the mixed news, directly relevant to Wax: immigrants who enforced the anti-littering norm were more likely to be helped, but nevertheless were NO MORE LIKELY to be helped than a native German who did NOT enforce the anti-littering norm.

In other words, immigrants who followed a social norm were rewarded with treatment equivalent to a native who did not.

Take this all with a grain of salt. It’s one experiment (albeit replicated over 1600 times with more than 7000 bystanders) and one type of social norm. But I think it does clearly speak to Wax’s argument, and not in a positive way.

@RyanDEnos