Norms for Behavioral Change (NBC) model: How injunctive norms and enforcement shift descriptive norms in science

Abstract

In this article, we introduce the Norms for Behavior Change model (NBC) to explain how injunctive norms coupled with enforcement promote community-level behavior change. We examine the NBC model in the context of open science. We conceptualize journal submission requirements as injunctive norms, and the shift towards open science as a profound change in descriptive norms of publishing for communities of scholars. We conducted two pilot studies and three main studies to examine the uneven adoption of open science practices across different behavioral sciences, which include Organizational Behavior (OB), Judgment and Decision Making (JDM), and psychology. In our first pilot study, we identify how actual injunctive norms about open science are particularly weak in OB because the majority of OB journals do not have explicit requirements for open science. In our second pilot study, we find that a substantial proportion of OB faculty view open science to be unhelpful for advancing the field. In Study 1, we survey OB faculty and JDM faculty, and find that OB faculty perceive injunctive and descriptive norms of publishing as less likely to include open science practices compared to JDM faculty. In Study 2, we code open science practices across OB and psychology journals in an archival data set, and demonstrate that the actual descriptive norms of publishing are less likely to adhere to open science practices in OB journals than psychology journals (where JDM researchers publish). In Study 3, we analyze an archival data set of preregistrations onaspredicted.org, and find that actual descriptive norms of open science are more likely to be adopted by experimentalists than non-experimentalists. Taken together, our work establishes the link between norms and behavioral change, and provides prescriptive advice on how to leverage injunctive norms to shift descriptive norms towards constructive community-level behaviors.