I recently attended a talk by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini. He specializes in “influence” — how to get people to do things. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear he is actually a professor of Marketing at Arizona State University. He has spent his career studying how to influence people, and has even written multiple books on the subject. In the talk I attended, he focused on one specific, and in his opinion very powerful, social influence: social norms.
Social norms are societal cues that create behavioral expectations. When you see a social norm, you feel like you should be doing that action too. There are two types of social norms that have been well-known for a long time: descriptive norms and injunctive norms. Descriptive norms are engaged when a person believes many others like them are engaging in a behavior. While there is no explicit motivation to “join the group”, many people still feel compelled to engage in that behavior also. Injunctive norms, on the other hand, reflect community standards of approval and disapproval. Injunctive norms have obvious paths of influence; if your community disapproves of some behavior, that discourages you from engaging in that behavior. However, Cialdini argues that descriptive norms may actually be a more powerful mechanism for influence because they are underdetected. (Nolan et al. 2008)
Cialdini did a great job of illustrating how little information is needed to engage a social norm to influence people’s behavior. In one of this studies, he swapped out the standard “please reuse these towel” messages in hotel rooms. The standard “do it for the environment” message was replaced with a short piece of text explaining that “the majority of guests reuse their towels.” This simple change, he argues, engages a descriptive social norm; people read this and believe that many other people reuse towels, and they should too. This change caused a 25% increase in the number of hotel guests to reuse towels. (The rate increased from 35.1% to 44.1% of guests.) However, remember that the descriptive social norm is engaged when a person believes that many others like them are engaging in a behavior. So he had yet another condition; the hang tag said that “the majority of guests in this room” reuse towels. This increased compliance even further; that condition had 49.3% of hotel guests reusing towels! (Goldstein et al. 2008)
There are a number of recent research papers by Cialdini and colleagues that illustrate how powerful descriptive social norms can be in influencing behavior. Cialdini espoused an interesting theory as to why descriptive social norms are so powerful: in addition to expressing a social expectation for behavior (“you should do this”), they also express feasibility (“you can do this”). I suspect that this feasibility component is really powerful, and it is something that most other incentives does not have. It is easy to provide incentives for a behavior that is actually infeasible to do; a descriptive social norm overcomes this problem by saying “other people like you have done this; you can too.”
References
Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V.. A room with a viewpoint: Using normative appeals to motivate environmental conservation in a hotel setting. Journal of Consumer Research (2008)
Nolan, J. M., Schultz, P. W., Cialdini, R. B., Goldstein, N. J., & Griskevicius, V.. Normative social influence is underdetected.. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2008).
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