Abstract
Recent years have seen a growth in the use of social norm messages by local and national governments across the world. These messages have primarily been used to induce desired behaviors among the non-compliant minority by pointing to the compliance of the majority. As well as being of considerable theoretical interest, these messages have a high level of empirical and experimental support in government settings as well as a few null and negative findings. In this introduction to the symposium, we offer an overview of research to date using social norms in public administration, reviewing what ‘stylized facts’ emerge, then introduce the articles included in the symposium.
Highlights
Introduction to the Papers in theSymposiumThe papers we selected represent excellent examples of the emergent work in this field, though they are only a subset of the total output available and in progress.The first article is on a vitally important topic, gender discrimination, which shows that social norms have come a long way from being thought to be mainly about more mundane issues like tax collection
We encouraged those whom we knew already to respond to this call, we were pleased to find that most of the interest came from researchers from outside our networks, suggesting a larger field of scholars working in this area than we had imagined previously, which indicates the health and diversity of this research field. We hope that this collection of papers itself will increase the visibility of this area of research and encourage researchers using social norms in all kinds of contexts and with a range of methods and theoretical concerns to continue their work and encourage others to do so. We introduce these papers in the symposium in the coda of this introduction
It is important to recognize the diminishing effect of social norms interventions over time, and the smaller effects observed in larger scale studies. These factors should give us pause before declaring “case closed” on social norms as a policy intervention, and we argue that further research is needed to uncover the limitations of social norm use in public administration – something that is a key goal of the remainder of this symposium
Summary
Introduction to the Papers in theSymposiumThe papers we selected represent excellent examples of the emergent work in this field, though they are only a subset of the total output available and in progress.The first article is on a vitally important topic, gender discrimination, which shows that social norms have come a long way from being thought to be mainly about more mundane issues like tax collection. In ‘Descriptive norms and gender diversity: Reactance from men’, Maliheh Paryavi, Iris Bohnet, and Alexandra van Geen deploy lab experiments to test whether the initial decision to hire proportions of male and female employees have effects on decisions down the line. These do not affect women, rather influencing men’s decisions in reaction to it. This brings the important behavioral/psychological concept of reactance together with social norms, because it is important to see social norms operating dynamically over time as people react to changing contexts The results from this experiment show how the way in which social norms are set influences their impact down the line, as well as showing the heterogeneity of the impact of social norms, another important and neglected topic of research. We expect this piece to stimulate a line of further research, hopefully with experiments done in the field
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