Journal ArticleDOI
Norm Perception as a Vehicle for Social Change
TLDR
This article describe three sources of information that people use to understand norms: individual behavior, summary information about a group, and institutional signals, and discuss conditions under which influence over perceived norms is likely to be stronger, based on the source of normative information and individuals' relationship to the source.Abstract:
How can we change social norms, the standards describing typical or desirable behavior? Because individuals’ perceptions of norms guide their personal behavior, influencing these perceptions is one way to create social change. And yet individuals do not form perceptions of typical or desirable behavior in an unbiased manner. Individuals attend to select sources of normative information, and their resulting perceptions rarely match actual rates of behavior in their environment. Thus, changing social norms requires an understanding of how individuals perceive norms in the first place. We describe three sources of information that people use to understand norms—individual behavior, summary information about a group, and institutional signals. Social change interventions have used each source to influence perceived norms and behaviors, including recycling, intimate-partner violence, and peer harassment. We discuss conditions under which influence over perceived norms is likely to be stronger, based on the source of the normative information and individuals’ relationship to the source. Finally, we point to future research and suggest when it is most appropriate to use a norm change strategy in the interest of behavior and social change.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change
TL;DR: The current research bridges the divide by exploring how people evaluate and process consensus cues in a polarized information environment and evidence is provided that it is possible to pre‐emptively protect public attitudes about climate change against real‐world misinformation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ten considerations for effectively managing the COVID-19 transition.
Katrine Bach Habersaat,Cornelia Betsch,Margie Danchin,Cass R. Sunstein,Robert Böhm,Armin Falk,Noel T. Brewer,Saad B. Omer,Martha Scherzer,Sunita Sah,Edward F. Fischer,Andrea E. Scheel,Daisy Fancourt,Shinobu Kitayama,Eve Dubé,Julie Leask,Mohan J. Dutta,Noni E. MacDonald,Anna Temkina,Andreas Lieberoth,Mark Jackson,Stephan Lewandowsky,Stephan Lewandowsky,Holly Seale,Nils Fietje,Philipp Schmid,Michele J. Gelfand,Lars Korn,Sarah Eitze,Lisa Felgendreff,Philipp Sprengholz,Cristiana Salvi,Robb Butler +32 more
TL;DR: Thirty-two experts propose ten considerations for managing the de-escalation of COVID-19 containment measures while still maintaining public adherence to social and physical distancing.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Effect of a Supreme Court Decision Regarding Gay Marriage on Social Norms and Personal Attitudes.
TL;DR: Findings provide the first experimental evidence that an institutional decision can change perceptions of social norms, which have been shown to guide behavior, even when individual opinions are unchanged.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The agenda-setting function of mass media
Maxwell McCombs,Donald L. Shaw +1 more
TL;DR: In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality as mentioned in this paper, and readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position.
Book
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
TL;DR: Zaller as discussed by the authors developed a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences, and applied this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate and presidential elections.
Journal ArticleDOI
A focus theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that norms do have a substantial impact on human action; however, the impact can only be properly recognized when researchers (a) separate two types of norms that at times act antagonistically in a situation, and (b) focus Ss' attention principally on the type of norm being studied.