Guide

Social norms & social networks

Social Norms & Social Networks Download PDF

It is very rarely that people act purely as indi­viduals. Most of our beha­viour is social – with family, friends, col­leagues or even strangers on the com­mute to work. Many strategies for pro­moting sus­tain­able beha­viour seem to forget this, and focus exclus­ively on people as individuals.

Too often, cli­mate change com­mu­nic­a­tions are dir­ected to the indi­vidual as a single unit in the larger social system. This can make the prob­lems feel too over­whelming, but through an enhanced aware­ness of what other people are doing, a stronger sense of col­lective pur­pose can be developed.

One of the most well-supported bodies of research on sus­tain­able beha­viour starts from the pos­i­tion that chan­ging indi­viduals’ actions is best achieved by high­lighting and influ­en­cing the beha­viour of others around them: focusing on social norms to pro­mote sus­tain­able beha­viour. Social norms are simply the stand­ards that we use to judge the appro­pri­ate­ness of our own beha­viour. People tend to act in a way that is socially accept­able, and so if a par­tic­ular beha­viour (lit­tering, for example, or driving a car with a large engine) can be cast in a socially unac­cept­able light, then people should be less likely to engage in it.

Pictures and videos of ordinary people (‘like me’) enga­ging in sus­tain­able beha­viours are a simple and effective way of gen­er­ating a sense of social nor­mality around saving energy (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein and Griskevicius, 2007). There are dif­ferent reasons that people adopt social norms, and encour­aging people to adopt a pos­itive norm simply to ‘con­form’, to avoid a feeling of guilt, or for fear of not ‘fit­ting in’ is likely to pro­duce a rel­at­ively shallow level of motiv­a­tion for beha­viour change. Where social norms can be com­bined with ‘intrinsic’ motiv­a­tions (e.g. a sense of social belonging), they are likely to be more effective and per­sistent (CCCAG, 2010).

However, while social norms are a powerful and effective way of influ­en­cing sus­tain­able beha­viours, there are some pit­falls to avoid. As Robert Cialdini and his col­leagues at Arizona State University have demon­strated, the problem with appeals based on social norms is that they often con­tain a hidden mes­sage (Cialdini, 2003). So, for example, a cam­paign that focuses on the fact that too many people take internal flights actu­ally con­tains two mes­sages – that taking internal flights is bad for the envir­on­ment, and that lots of people are taking internal flights. This second mes­sage can make the cam­paign coun­ter­pro­ductive: by con­veying how common the undesir­able beha­viour is, it can give those who do not cur­rently engage in that beha­viour a per­verse incentive to do so.

In an exper­i­ment led by the psy­cho­lo­gist Wesley Schultz (Schultz et al, 2007), researchers examined the influ­ence of social norms on the house­hold energy con­sump­tion of res­id­ents of California. The researchers picked houses at random and then divided them into groups depending on whether their energy con­sump­tion was higher or lower than the average for that area. Some low-energy-use house­holds received only inform­a­tion about average energy usage — thereby set­ting the social norm. A second group of low-energy house­holds had a pos­itive “emoticon” (happy face) posi­tioned next to their per­sonal energy figure, con­veying approval of their energy foot­print. A third group of over-consuming house­holds were shown their energy usage coupled with a neg­ative emoticon (sad face), intended to convey dis­ap­proval of their higher-than-average footprint.

The researchers then meas­ured energy con­sump­tion in the fol­lowing months. As one might expect, the over-consuming house­holds used the social norm as a motiv­a­tion to reduce their energy use, but under-consuming house­holds that had received only the social norm inform­a­tion increased their energy use. Crucially, though, the under-consuming house­holds that had received pos­itive feed­back did not show this boom­erang effect: the addi­tion of a smiley face next to their energy usage made all the dif­fer­ence. Despite the sim­pli­city of the feed­back, house­holds that felt their under-consumption was socially approved (rather than a reason to relax), main­tained their small energy foot­print. This sug­gests that using social norms can be effective — but only if they are used in the right way.

This aca­demic research is now being put into prac­tice by the energy com­pany Opower, who have used simple social norm strategies like this to achieve con­sistent sav­ings on average energy use with their US cus­tomers (Allcott, 2010). Working with the UK government’s Behavioural Insight Team (Behavioural Insight Team, 2011), Opower are now tri­al­ling sim­ilar tech­niques in the UK. But the strategy of focus­sing on the ‘social’ rather than the ‘indi­vidual’ level can be taken much fur­ther than clev­erly designed energy bills: there are few influ­ences more powerful than an individual’s social net­work, and if pos­itive norms for sus­tain­able beha­viour are incor­por­ated at this level, they will have even more of an impact.

Social net­works are every­where. Friends, col­leagues, neigh­bours and family make up most people’s net­work of social con­tacts, and they have a powerful effect on our beha­viour. The idea that inform­a­tion and innov­a­tion can spread through social net­works is not a new one – in the field of com­mer­cial mar­keting, advert­ising cam­paigns tar­geting ‘opinion leaders’ and influ­en­tial indi­viduals is com­mon­place. In other fields – health beha­viour for example – cam­paigns often target peer groups and existing social net­works, in the hope that the spreading of pos­itive health beha­viours will be more likely within groups of indi­viduals who trust each other and pay atten­tion to each others’ behaviour.

Can social net­works be used to spread pro-environmental beha­viour? Unfortunately, there is not much in the way of direct evid­ence to answer this ques­tion. Olli, Grendstad & Wollebaek (2001) have sug­gested that whether or not people are in an ‘envir­on­mental net­work’ is one of the biggest determ­in­ants of enga­ging in pro-environmental beha­viour (see also Nye & Burgess, 2008). This doesn’t tell us whether social net­works dif­fuse pro-environmental beha­viour among their mem­bers, or whether people with a pre-existing interest in pro-environmental beha­viour join these sorts of social net­works. But the evid­ence that does exist about social net­works and the dif­fu­sion of beha­viour in gen­eral sug­gests that sus­tain­able beha­viours will be enhanced by tar­geting social net­works rather than individuals.

Social net­works are important for cre­ating a social iden­tity that incor­por­ates sus­tain­ab­ility as a guiding prin­ciple (Rabinovich et al., 2010), rather than simply passing on a series of dis­jointed beha­viours that may benefit the envir­on­ment. If sus­tain­able beha­viour is incor­por­ated at this level (and becomes defining for a social group) more sig­ni­ficant beha­vi­oural changes (rein­forced through peer pres­sure) are likely to be facil­it­ated. Targeting social net­works also helps to enhance ‘social cap­ital’ – some­thing that is crit­ical for building the resi­li­ence to cope with and adapt to changes brought about by adapting to cli­mate change (Rowson et al., 2010). And the efficacy of group based pro­grammes at pro­moting pro-environmental beha­viour change has been demon­strated on numerous occa­sions – par­ti­cipants in these pro­jects con­sist­ently point to a sense of mutual learning and sup­port as a key reason for making and main­taining changes in beha­viour (Nye and Burgess, 2008).

One pro­gramme in North Carolina (DuRant et al, 2006), aimed at pre­venting teenage preg­nancy, used parent-child rela­tion­ships to get the mes­sage across, with the tagline:

‘Talk to Your Kids About Sex. Everyone else is’.

It tar­geted its mes­sages to take advantage of existing social net­work rela­tions – good friends, par­ents, spouses and sib­lings. This cam­paign tried to create a social norm for talking to chil­dren about sex, and used an existing powerful social rela­tion­ship to get the mes­sage across. A phone survey estab­lished that par­ents exposed to the cam­paign were more likely to talk to their kids about sex the next month. The trick was to use mass com­mu­nic­a­tion to encourage inter-personal com­mu­nic­a­tion – so that the actual work of per­sua­sion was done by peers. This has also been shown to be suc­cessful in redu­cing levels of campus alcohol abuse by stu­dents in America (DeYoung et al, 2006). In this study, both per­cep­tions about the norm­ative level of drinking beha­viour and drinking beha­viour were reduced.

For the majority of people, their social net­work is unlikely to be one that has cli­mate change at its core. But social net­works – Trade Unions, Rugby Clubs, Mother & Toddler groups – still per­form a crit­ical role in spreading change through society. Encouraging and sup­porting pre-existing social net­works to take own­er­ship of cli­mate change (rather than approach it as a problem for ‘green groups’) is a crit­ical task.