Social Norms

Essay by JingruWu10University, Master'sA, October 2014

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Jingru Wu

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Talking about the reconstructive power of social norms, Wanke states "although providing descriptive normative information may decrease undesirable behaviors for individuals who perform such behavior at a rate above the norm, the same message may actually serve to increase the same undesirable behaviors for individuals who perform such behaviors at a rate below the norm" (Wanke, 2009). For example, according to daily news, seeing just one cigarette advertisement immediately increases someone's desire to smoke by 22% (Murray, 2013). An advice from Wanke to reduce this backfire effect of descriptive norms is to add injunctive normative information. However, those anti-smoking advertisements, which link smoking with injunctive normative information, actually sometimes make you smoke more (Brooks, 2014). Why?

This reminds me a theory called "deviance -regulation theory"(Blanton& Stuart, 2001). The theory suggests that people self-regulate more on the basis of the perceived social consequences of deviating from behavioral norms than on the basis of the perceived social consequences of conforming to behavioral norms.

Therefore, changing the message framing is necessary when you try to persuade certain behaviors by using social norms. For example, if you want to persuade students to have flu shots, you would better say, "only a few student go to have flu shots, and they are good" rather than "many students go to have flu shots, and they are good". On the other hand, you can also say," few students don't go to have flu shots are bad" rather than "many students don't go to have flu shots, and they are bad".

Back to the hotel example that Wanke uses in the article, if the hotel persuades guests to reuse the towels by saying "We have 40% guests who reuse the towels, they are environment protector", is it going to be useful?...