Managing social norms for persuasive impact

Cialdini, Robert B.; Demaine, Linda J.; Sagarin, Brad J.; Barrett, Daniel W.; Rhoads, Kelton; Winter, Patricia L.

doi:10.1080/15534510500181459

Cited by 766 publications

(633 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…First, there is evidence that some social norms campaigns resulted in "boomerang" effects, increasing the undesired behaviour that the campaign aimed to reduce [15,29]. The potential solution could be not to present descriptive norms information in a way that suggests that the undesired behaviour is common, or presenting it in combination with injunctive norms.…”

Section: Concerns About the Application Of Social Norm Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two kinds of norms can be distinguished: descriptive norms (what most people do) and injunctive norms (what most people would approve to be the right thing to do). Sometimes, persuasive attempts are only successful when these two types of norms are combined [15,16]. Sometimes the two types of norms pull in different directions (e.g., most people may believe that buying organic food is the right thing to do, but the majority of food sold is still conventional).…”

Section: Social Norm Approaches To Promote Pro-environmental Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because of the strong evidence of social norms being effective in steering human decisions [14,15,39,40], there is good reason to assume that this effect is manifested in a supermarket setting as well. However, reservations have been voiced about the effectiveness of social norms interventions.…”

Section: Concerns About the Application Of Social Norm Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Social norm interventions are especially powerful for behaviours that are easy to engage in, when they are easily noticeable, understandable, displayed in the moment of action, and formulated in a way that avoids potential "boomerang" effects [11]. Furthermore, social norm communication was found most effective if the social norm message contains not only information about the behaviour of others, but also about similarities between the receiver and the reference group, for example in terms of location and time [14,15,36]. …”

Section: Social Norm Approaches To Promote Pro-environmental Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, hotel guests have been asked to reuse their towels by a message written on door hangers [36], park visitors have been invited not to steal petrified wood by signs installed in the park [15], public toilet users have been asked to switch off the light by means of colorful prompts [37], and consumers have been informed about the health food choices of other consumers via signs installed on the shopping basket [35,38]. Social norm interventions are especially powerful for behaviours that are easy to engage in, when they are easily noticeable, understandable, displayed in the moment of action, and formulated in a way that avoids potential "boomerang" effects [11].…”

Section: Social Norm Approaches To Promote Pro-environmental Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Social Norms Intervention Going Wrong: Boomerang Effects from Descriptive Norms Information

2018

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Abstract:A large body of research supports the idea of social norms communication promoting pro-social and pro-environmental behaviour. This paper investigates social norms communication in the field. Signs prompting consumers about sustainable seafood labels and informing them about other consumers' sustainable choices were displayed in supermarkets in Norway and Germany. Seafood sales (sustainably labelled versus unlabelled products) were observed before, during, and after the implementation of the signs. The expected change towards more sustainable choices was generally not found. In Norway, the choice of sustainable seafood increased in the prompt-only condition, but the effect was neutralised when social norms information was added. In Germany, social norm messages lead to a decline in sustainable choices compared to baseline, a boomerang effect. Overall, an increase in the purchase of seafood (both sustainably labelled and unlabelled) was noted during the intervention. A second study was carried out to further explore the finding that consumers were mainly primed with "seafood" as a food group. In a laboratory setting, participants were confronted with stereotypical food pictures, combined with short sentences encouraging different consumption patterns. Subsequently, they were asked to choose food products in a virtual shop. Confirming the findings of Study 1, participants chose more of the groceries belonging to the food group they were primed with. These studies suggest that social norms interventions-recently often perceived as "the Holy Grail" for behaviour change-are not as universally applicable as suggested in the literature. According to this study, even descriptive norm messages can produce boomerang effects.

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Section: Concerns About the Application Of Social Norm Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Norm Approaches To Promote Pro-environmental Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Concerns About the Application Of Social Norm Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Norm Approaches To Promote Pro-environmental Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Norm Approaches To Promote Pro-environmental Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Social Norms Intervention Going Wrong: Boomerang Effects from Descriptive Norms Information

2018

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Twitter as a Potential Data Source for Cardiovascular Disease Research

et al. 2016

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Importance Twitter has recently been explored as a data source by researchers in multiple fields, though, as a whole, the research remains nascent. Even less is known about using Twitter to study cardiovascular disease. Objective We sought to characterize the volume and content of tweets related to cardiovascular disease, and the characteristics of Twitter users. Design We used the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) to access a random sample of tweets from July 2009 to February 2015. We filtered approximately 10 billion tweets for keywords related to cardiovascular disease. We included only English tweets originating from US counties. We characterized each tweet relative to estimated user demographics. A random subset of 2,500 tweets was hand-coded for tweet content and modifiers. Setting Twitter, a social media platform Participants Twitter users tweeting about cardiovascular disease Exposures None Main outcomes and measures Our main outcomes included the volume of tweets about cardiovascular disease on Twitter and the content of these tweets. Results Diabetes (n=239,989) and myocardial infarction (269,907) terms were used more frequently than heart failure (9,414) terms. Users tweeting about cardiovascular disease were more likely to be older than the average Twitter population (mean age= 28.68 vs. 25.36, p<0.01), and less likely to be male (47% vs. 49%, p <0.01). Most tweets (94%) were health related. Common themes included tweets related to risk factors (42%), awareness (23%) and management (23%). Conclusions and relevance Twitter offers promise to characterize public understanding and communication about heart disease.

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