Norm Me (Social Influences)

Leveraging the behavior, beliefs, and expectations of others

Introduction to Norm Me

Guidance for Theory of Change Development

This lever is useful when target actors…

This lever pairs well with...

Common traps to avoid

Additional Resources for Norm Me

Introduction to Norm Me

Humans are deeply social creatures, evolved to be highly sensitive to the actions of those around them and to use people’s expectations and beliefs as guidance about how to act. Social norms shape how an individual’s actions are influenced by others’ beliefs and actions as well as what others think an individual should be doing. There are various types of social influence; two particularly powerful forms are:

Descriptive norms, i.e., an actor’s belief about what most other actors are doing and thinking in a given situation, and,
Injunctive norms or social expectations, i.e., an actor's belief about what other actors think about or expect in a given situation, and how this may affect said actors’ reputation.

As a result, the observability of people’s behaviors and messaging around what “most” people do, believe, or expect are all important when considering a social influence intervention. Importantly, social norms can become self-enforcing once enough people in a group or community expects a given set of behaviors, making this lever especially powerful in generating lasting behavior change.

Guidance for Theory of Change Development

Make sure you start developing the theory of change with the desired behavior change in mind. Then, when writing a psycho-social state intermediate result using Norm Me you might use words like:

How actors see others doing or not doing the behavior
What actors believe about others doing or not doing the behavior
How actors believe they are being perceived by others?
What actors believe others think about their actions
How actors have heard about the behavior from key influencers

Generic Pathways for Norm Me

Type A. Make the target behavior observable

Example(s) of Type A. Make the target behavior observable

The organization TRAFFIC recruited traditional medicine practitioners to publicly pledge to refrain from using rhino horn. By socially binding these practitioners to their commitments and making the new norm more visible in the practitioner community, the program has already led to a measurable reduction in the use of illegal wildlife products (Offrod-Woolley, 2017).

Program designers identified that reducing energy consumption during peak periods was a public goods problem: everyone was better off reducing their air conditioning usage to stabilize the electric grid, but each individual did better free-riding on the reduction of others. In creating an energy reduction program, designers found that increasing the observability of people’s energy use (i.e., making it visible to others) increased participation because others could now see whether each actor participated. They designed an intervention that made sign-ups to the program public rather than private (and, by design, also made “not signing up” public), which led to a threefold increase in participation (Yoeli et al, 2013).

Type B. Highlight others who are doing the behavior

Example(s) of Type B. Highlight others who are doing the behavior

Across several countries, farmers were more likely to adopt new techniques or to sign up for agri-environmental schemes if the recommendation comes from other farmers or if they know that other farmers have signed up. (Fafchamps et al, 2020).

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Type C. Share others' expectations about the target behavior

Example(s) of Type C. Share others' expectations about the target behavior

In Perú, a local campaign promoted the importance of natural resources, as well as the individual and collective benefits that reciprocal water agreements could have on the community for upstream and downstream users. Downstream users compensated upstream farmers in exchange for their environmental management upstream. This campaign resulted in water users signing 25 reciprocal water agreements, collectively protecting 362 hectares of threatened habitat in the Quanda micro-watershed (Martinez et al, 2013).

A study in Colombia showed that they could align farmers’ expectations and behaviors to conserve their forests by providing collective payments only when all farmers achieved a forest conservation goal (Moros et al, 2019).

This lever is useful when target actors…

➡️ identify as part of, or have close association with a group or social network

➡️ can observe the behavior of others in their social network.

➡️ are experiencing a cooperative dilemma or behavior where people in their social network share a resource (e.g., fishery, aquifer, etc.).

➡️ behavior is influenced by the opinions and judgements of others in their social network

This lever pairs well with...

Make Me (Rules and Regulation) where social norms help to strengthen laws or set the scene for a law to be accepted by a community
Show Me (Information) when information that shows social comparison and social trends, or is delivered by key messengers

Common traps to avoid

Emphasizing norms that are trending in the wrong direction, rather than in the direction you want. This can happen by mistake, but also remember that the environment in which people make decisions can be the strongest normative signal affecting decision-makers.
Exaggerating the numbers of people taking action to create a norm message supportive of your target behavior, or promoting a norm that does not align with people’s perception of reality (whether because of norm misperceptions or because of the audience’s specific reference group).
Over-generalizing the norm. Understand that norms are highly culturally specific and can be group specific.
Creating ‘rebound effects’ that are counterproductive (e.g., anti-poaching ads making people think it would be lucrative business to get into or talking about how few people are doing a behavior)