Browsing by Subject "behavioral interventions"

This thesis investigates social norm interventions, interventions that target the influence of social norms to change behavior. Despite their increasing diversity and popularity, there has so far been a lack of systematic understanding of what different types of social norm interventions there are, and in which context they are effective and acceptable. The purpose of this thesis is to answer these questions of scope and applicability of social norm interventions by offering an account of their mechanisms of operation, the causal pathways through which they affect behavior. It does so in two stages. In the first stage, theoretical explanations of social norms’ influence are integrated into a unified model that represents the underlying processes postulated in them as causal pathways leading to conformity. The influence of social norms involves perceptions about what is commonly done or approved of, possible personal normative attitudes, the activation of these in response to situational cues, and some type of motivating reason. The different pathways can be grouped under informational influence, coordination, or social pressure, each representing a distinct form of social norms’ influence. In the second stage, the model is used as a framework to outline the main ways in which the influence of social norms can be manipulated. Social norm interventions can either (1) update perceptions about the behavior or normative attitudes of others, (2) control norm activation, (3) manipulate contextual factors relevant for the different motivations, or (4) target the sources of social norms’ influence in actual normative attitudes or the behavior of others. The first conclusion of this thesis, addressing scope, is that because social norm interventions operate by manipulating the processes underlying social norms’ influence, their scope corresponds to the four main categories. The second conclusion, addressing applicability, is that because the effectiveness of a social norm intervention is determined by the fit between the manipulation it implements and the features of the target context, social norm interventions in general are applicable in contexts where one of the pathways can be made to produce the desired behavioral outcome in an acceptable way. Third, also related to applicability, it is argued that one reason for the heterogeneous results of many social norm interventions is that they are prone to operating through different mechanisms in different contexts. Finally, as an example of how the account can be applied to the analysis of actual intervention practices, it is argued that a likely explanation for the inconsistent results of a popular social norm intervention, the use of social comparison for encouraging household energy conservation, is the mismatch between the processes most likely affected by the intervention and the motivation required for conformity in typical contexts.