Does poverty negate the impact of social norms on cheating?
通过泰国低收入稻农的实地实验，研究发现贫困本身不直接影响作弊意愿，但社会规范提醒干预在富裕时有效，在贫困时无效，提示干预时机的重要性。
Cheating such as corruption and tax evasion is prevalent in the developing world; therefore, many interventions have been undertaken to reduce cheating in developing countries. Although some field evidence shows that poverty is correlated with cheating, the causal effect of poverty on cheating in the field and the effectiveness of interventions for financially constrained people remain an open question. We present results from a lab-in-the-field experiment with low-income rice farmers in Thailand (N = 568), in which we, first, investigate the causal effect of poverty on cheating and, second, test whether poverty affects the effectiveness of a social-norm intervention to reduce cheating. We show poverty itself does not affect willingness to cheat. However, although a social-norm-reminder intervention reduced cheating when the population was richer (after harvest), it had no effect when the population was poorer (before harvest). Our results suggest that the timing of interventions to change behavior might matter.