The Power of Social Norms? (It's Not Always Easy Being Green)

One of my lingering questions about the norm-based models for this week is the distinction between personal norms and social norms, and relatedly, whether social norms are adequately accounted for in these *norm*-based models.

This question probably arises from my specific disciplinary background, but in social psychology, there is a lot of emphasis on the importance of social or even situational norms. Looking ahead in the syllabus, I see that we'll be talking about some of the classic social psychology experiments on situational norms and environmental behaviors next month, but I think that even without having read those studies we can think about the powerful influence of social norms. After all, we all know the major role that peer pressure can play in our lives; we often feel pressure to conform to actions and even attitudes that we perceive being done by or held by many other people. And I bet most of us can think of a personal example of when peer pressure caused us to do or say something that may not have entirely been in line with our personal values. There's even a famous psych experiment which showed that if you ask people to do a very easy task (i.e., judging whether two lines are the same length or not), you can peer-pressure them into giving an obviously wrong answer by asking them to respond after all the other people in the room have responded one-by-one with the wrong answer!

So, given our firsthand knowledge of the power of peer pressure, I think that it is valid to consider whether or not the Norm Activation Model and Value-Belief-Norm Model account adequately for the influence of social norms. In the Norm Activation Model, social norms must be internalized into personal norms in order to affect behavior, and (as I understand it) the personal norm must incorporate a sense of personal responsibility and strong intrinsic motivation to take action. But don't temporary, situational norms sometimes influence one-time behaviors without a corresponding internalization of personal norms? For example, even if I feel pressured in the moment to conform to others' incorrect responses on a line judgment task, that does not mean I have internalized a personal norm to give incorrect answers to easy tasks.

On the opposite extreme, the Hines et al. environmental education model we previously discussed does include a path for "situational factors" (like norms) to influence behavior directly, without involving personal norms. But, this model has the opposite problem of not allowing for situational social norms to be internalized as personal norms at all, and that seems to be a problematic omission as well! There are many instances in which we *do* indeed derive our personal norms and values from the dominant social norms set by those around us. Meanwhile, the Value-Belief-Norm Model seems to omit social norms entirely (!) by instead focusing on how our personal values and beliefs drive our personal norms, which then determine our behavior.

I think this is an important issue to think about because social norms and "unwritten rules" about acceptable social behavior in different contexts play such a big role in our day-to-day behaviors. When social norms influence our personal norms, they certainly have important implications for our environmental behavior; and even when situational norms influence our behavior without being internalized as personal norms, they may still end up having a long-term impact. In lecture, Ray has mentioned the issue of whether attitudes always determine behaviors or whether it's possible that behaviors can determine attitudes. I think the latter case definitely has the potential to drive behavioral change; if we can use situational norms to get people to perform proenvironmental behaviors, even though they haven't yet internalized a personal proenvironmental norm, it is possible that by performing the behavior they will start to think of themselves as "proenvironmental" and thus continuing behaving in ways consistent with that identity.

So, perhaps we need a norm-based model that allows norms to influence behavior both directly and indirectly via the internalization of personal norms. But I would love to hear more about what you all think about this, either in comments here on the blog or perhaps in discussion during class!