Harnessing Social Norms for Social Good
When I wrote this article, the Coronavirus had just been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization,1 and the United States had declared a national emergency.2
Since then, health officials have tried (quite successfully) to promote behaviors that can reduce the spread and transmission of the Coronavirus — including the one we are all quite familiar with now, social distancing, or the practice of avoiding unnecessary contact with others in order to slow the transmission of the disease.
While social distancing is essential to slow the spread of COVID-19 — which in turn reduces the strain on our healthcare system and saves lives — it is personally costly for the individual, as it requires personal sacrifice (forget about going out to brunch).
As such, now more than ever it is important to understand how insights from behavioral science can promote prosocial behaviors and get people to prioritize shared over individual interests. One potentially powerful set of tools to promote behavioral change is social norms.
Social norms are overt or unspoken rules that govern what behaviors are viewed as appropriate in society. Norms are frequently enforced by other members of the group and violating a norm can result in anything from social disapproval or informal sanctions to ostracization.3
Our predilection to create and conform to social norms is thought to be universal, occurring in diverse societies and cultures across the planet, although their expression is likely culturally dependent.4 Children as young as 3 years old begin to shift their behavior in accordance with local social norms, suggesting that our sensitivity to norms arises early in development.5 Taken together, this early internalization and ubiquity of norms suggests that we have evolved an innate sensitivity to follow them.6
Research on social norms has found that they have a profound impact on behavior across a wide range of domains such as decreasing littering,7 improving energy conservation,8 increasing hygienic behavior,9 and reducing student gambling.10
To get a better sense of the influence of social norms on human behavior, let’s look at a foundational study of social norms by Robert Cialdini and colleagues.11
References
[1] Gumbrecht, J. & Howard, J. (2020, March 11). WHO declares novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. CNN, retrieved from https://www.cnn.com.
[2] Savage, S. (2020, March 13). Trump Declared an Emergency Over Coronavirus. Here’s What It Can Do. New York Times, retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com.
[3] Fehr, E., Fischbacher, U., & Gächter, S. (2002). Strong reciprocity, human cooperation, and the enforcement of social norms. Human Nature, 13(1), 1-25.
[4] House, B. R., Kanngiesser, P., Barrett, H. C., Broesch, T., Cebioglu, S., Crittenden, A. N., Erut, A., Lew-Levy, S., Sebastian-Enesco, C., Smith, A.M. and Yilmaz, S. & Yilmaz, S., & Silk, J. (2020). Universal norm psychology leads to societal diversity in prosocial behaviour and development. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(1), 36-44.
[5] House, B. R. (2018). How do social norms influence prosocial development?. Current Opinions in Psychology, 20, 87-91.
[6] Chudek, M., & Henrich, J. (2011). Culture–gene coevolution, norm-psychology and the emergence of human prosociality. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(5), 218-226.
[7] Cialdini, R. B., Reno, R. R., & Kallgren, C. A. (1990). A focus theory of normative conduct: recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(6), 1015.
[8] Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). A room with a viewpoint: Using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(3), 472-482.
[9] Leoniak, K. J., & Maj, K. (2016). A slice of hygiene: justification and consequence in the persuasiveness of prescriptive and proscriptive signs. Social Influence, 11(4), 271-283.
[10] Larimer, M. E., & Neighbors, C. (2003). Normative misperception and the impact of descriptive and injunctive norms on college student gambling. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 17(3), 235.
[11] Cialdini, R. B., Demaine, L. J., Sagarin, B. J., Barrett, D. W., Rhoads, K., & Winter, P. L. (2006). Managing social norms for persuasive impact. Social Influence, 1(1), 3-15.
About the Author
Paul Deutchman
Paul is a social psychologist and behavioral scientist studying collective action and social norms. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. The goal of his research program is to better understand the social cognitive abilities that allow our species to cooperate successfully across diverse contexts. To do this, he conducts behavioral experiments and survey research with children and adults to better understand how these social-cognitive processes emerge across ontogeny and come to underlie and shape cooperative behavior.
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