ORIGINAL PAPER Negative Descriptive Social Norms and Political Action: People Aren’t Acting, So You Should Hans J. G. Hassell 1 • Emily E. Wyler 2 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Individuals learn about the actions or behaviors of other people through the use of descriptive social norms. Previous work has argued that the use of negative descriptive norms (or information indicating many people are not doing something) depresses participation relative to positive descriptive norms. We show that for political actions this is not always correct. Using two experiments, we examine the willingness of individuals to take public action when these requests include either a positive or a negative descriptive norm. In the first, we invite individuals to write a local city official about city policy and in the second, we ask individuals to sign a petition advocating a specific policy at a large public university. We find that indi- viduals are more likely to act when presented with the negative descriptive norm and that this effect stems from the anger negative descriptive norms elicit. Keywords Political behavior Á Call-to-action Á Social descriptive norms We’re puzzled. We’ve read story after story about how donors would be rushing into help save the House, but the donations simply haven’t come in. -National Republican Congressional Committee, August 22, 2016 fundraising email to supporters Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109- 018-9450-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Hans J. G. Hassell hans.hassell@gmail.com Emily E. Wyler emwyler@gmail.com 1 Florida State University, Tallahasse, FL, USA 2 Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA, USA 123 Polit Behav https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9450-z