Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: An empirical test in Nigeria

Abstract

Social scientists have long sought to explain why people donate resources for the good of a community. Less attention has been paid to the difficult task of motivating the first adopters of these important behaviors. In a field experiment in Nigeria, we tested two campaigns that encouraged people to try reporting corruption by text message. Psychological theories about how to shift perceived norms and how to reduce barriers to action drove the design of each campaign. The first, a film featuring actors reporting corruption, and the second, a mass text message reducing the effort required to report, caused a total of 1181 people in 106 communities to text, including 241 people who sent concrete corruption reports. Psychological theories of social norms and behavior change can illuminate the early stages of the evolution of cooperation and collective action, when adoption is still relatively rare.

Countering Violence Against Women by Encouraging Disclosure: A Mass Media Experiment in Rural Uganda

“…Education-entertainment programs have been more successful in changing behaviors. Blair et al (2019) found that embedding an encouragement to report corruption in a feature-length film induced Nigerian viewers to report hundreds of instances of corruption. Exposure to a yearlong radio soap opera reduced Rwandan listeners’ deference to authority (Paluck & Green, 2009).…”

“…To understand whether expectations around disclosure are amenable to change through interventions that can be scaled easily, we designed an experiment in rural Uganda. In light of recent randomized trials on the topics of corruption (Blair et al, 2019), HIV (Banerjee et al, 2019b), and ethnic conflict (Paluck & Green, 2009), mass media dramatizations of social problems, or “education-entertainment,” are believed to be a promising and scalable way to bring about normative and behavioral change. We present new experimental evidence illustrating mass media’s potential as well as its limitations.…”

Social norms, misperceptions, and mosquito net use: a population-based, cross-sectional study in rural Uganda

“…Although most of this work has primarily been conducted in high-income countries, a few studies from sub-Saharan Africa have identified misperceptions of social norms and associations between norm perception and personal behaviour about HIV-prevention related behaviours [9, 69–72] and environmental-related attitudes and behaviours [73]. In addition, a few experimental studies on other topics in Africa have found that changes in perceived norms were associated with changes in personal behaviour [74–77]. However, no studies on mosquito net use have compared the gap between an individual’s perception about whether daily mosquito net use was normative in a given population and the actual norm for mosquito net use in that population.…”

Indian Idols Drinking Milk: Understanding the Phenomenon and Its Implications for Social Reform

“…The extant knowledge of these two mechanisms underlying conformity to the norms can now be used to demand compliance to the laws and rules formulated by the legitimate authorities and followed by most citizens. Such strategies by social institutions have been effective in regulating perceptions and behaviours across the globe (Blair, Littman, & Paluck 2019). It is high time for psychologists in India to study the new norms and for the media to give them the much needed support in shaping the new psyche of India.…”