José-Alberto Guerra 

​Anti-social norms, September 2025 (submitted), with Fergusson Leopoldo and Robinson James, [Online Appendix]

Third-party punishment is key to promoting fairness and other desirable social outcomes, yet some norms undermine it. We study the norm to “mind your own business,”which explicitly discourages third-party punishment. In dictator games, allowing punished senders to send a costless message invoking this norm erodes fairness: transfers fall 30%, even splits by 20 points, matching levels with no third-party punishments. We demonstrate that, according to our definition, the norm is anti-social: most view it as inappropriate yet expect others to invoke it. We model how this paradox sustains and explore the historical origin of the norm’s saliency in Colombia.​​

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Guns, pets, and strikes: An experiment on political action and social interactions, May 2025 (submitted), with Ginzburg Boris, [Online Appendix]

We study the role of political collective action in shaping subsequent social interactions. In an experiment, subjects choose whether to participate in real-world collective action. Following participation choices, we observe increased prosociality between participants, but not within other pairs. Based on this, we develop a model of participation, which predicts that higher valuation of the cause makes an individual expect higher participation by others, and higher expectation increases payoffs and makes an individual more likely to participate. We test these predictions using data from the experiment, finding support for them. This helps explain the role of coordination in collective action.​​

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Selected Work in progress

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Reading Others as Individuals: A Field Experiment on Fiction and Prosociality, with Ferro, Juan​ (analysis)

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Team-up to move-up: team interactions and social mobility , with Caicedo, Santiago and Zárate, Román (analysis)

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Authority, Leadership and Social Skills: Evidence from Police Academies, with Van Effenterre, Clémentine and Zárate, Román (analysis)

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What drives collective action? Evidence from a field experiment, with Ginzburg, Boris (pilot completed)

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Breaking the Bubble: Economic Elite Exposure to Marginalized Communities, with Blattman, Chris and Ortiz, Miguel (pilot ongoing)​