Following the Norms or Following the Crowd?

We investigated the role of information about social norms in shaping people's policy preferences concerning the current hate speech situation in Japan. More specifically, using a web-survey experiment, we tested whether two types of information, bandwagon message and anti-discrimination message, would influence the respondents' attitudes towards government regulation against hate speech. Our analysis shows that the bandwagon message slightly changed some individuals’ responses to hate speech regulation and made them conform to the majority opinion. To be more precise, those who are predisposed to give socially desirable answers were more influenced by the bandwagon information. The anti-discrimination message also slightly changed the individuals’ responses but in the opposite direction.