[MUSIC] Creating, changing, or completing abandoning a social norm, are all processes with similar requirements. First, there must be shared reasons for a change to occur. Reasons may involve receiving new factual information, accompanied by a change of personal normative beliefs, prudential and not. Having reasons for change is not sufficient for change to occur. But it is a necessary precondition. Now suppose that we all have good reasons to change or abandon a practice, and that we're even aware of these reasons. We know it would be beneficial to behave differently. Yet, to change behavior, we must be reasonably sure that we are not acting alone. The reason is simple. When behaviors are interdependent, acting alone may be dicey. With the social norm it's especially risky to a first mover. The behavior dictated by the norm is not just normal, it is also collectively approved of. Or at least it appears to be collectively approved of, as in the case of pluralistic ignorance. Deviating from it unilaterally invites many negative consequences. Think of child marriage. There are many reasons why a family might want to marry off one's daughter, and many other reasons to wait until she's older. By delaying marriage in a community where all girls get married as soon as they reach puberty, invites criticism, ostracism, or worse. In this scenario, late marriage harms the entire family and of course the girl. Such behavior incurs the risk of dishonor, and the prospect of not finding a suitable husband later on. Even if a father is convinced that sending his daughter to school and delaying marriage would be the best course of action, he is in the grip of a collective action problem. It may be collectively beneficial to change behavior, but it is individually more convenient and less risky to embrace a status quo, provided heexpects others to embrace it too. Mutual expectation are thus another factor that help or hinder change, because what we expect others to do influences our own choice. Remember, social norms involve a conditional preference to conform based on the presence of social expectations. To escape the collective action trap, we need to develop new social expectation and trust the change is coming. So another factor necessary for transformation is a collective change of expectation. How this change can happen, is one of the most interesting and challenging questions we must answer if we want to understand norm dynamics. Now, suppose we have both reasons to change behavior, and expect that most members of our reference network want change too. Still, we need to coordinate action to be sure that we will all end up in a better state. Expecting change is not the same is actually changing behavior. So another question we must answer is how to induce coordinated action. As you can see, norm creation and norm abandonment share some common features. People must have shared reasons to change their practice, they face a collective action problem. Their social expectation must collectively change, and behavior change has to be coordinated. There are however important differences between norm creation and norm abandonment. The order of expectation change is inverted. For social norm to develop, normative expectation must be first established. And then, empirical expectation will follow. To abandon a social norm instead, first empirical expectation have to change. And then we will witness a change in normative expectation. Why this different order? To feel safe in adopting a new behavior, individuals must come to believe that no negative sanction will follow. Which means that so many others have abandoned the old ways, punishing them all would be effective or irrelevant. Even if we may come to think that many are ready to abandon a practice, we only tend to believe what we see. This is why the need to change empirical expectation comes first. I am providing a simplified outline for what in reality is often a much more complex dynamic. When a social norm is abandoned, a new norm may be created. So that the interplay between the change of empirical expectation and the creation of new normative expectation may happen in overlapping ways. For example, the successful campaigns for the abandonment of female genital cutting, such as the Saleema campaign. Where at the same time changing people's empirical expectation about the universality of the practice, and creating new normative expectation about the importance of being uncut. What I wish to stress is that both social expectation that is empirical and normative, will be important in norm change. But the order in which they should change will differ depending on whether we're dealing with norm creation or abandonment. We should pay attention to each type of social expectation when designing intervention. In the following diagram, I'm listing the necessary steps that we need to undertake to abandon a social norm. As we shall see, a change in empirical expectation is a crucial step, because it will weaken pre-existing normative of expectation. Even if norm abandoned is accompanied by the creation of a new norm, the new normative expectation will not be sufficient to motivate behavior, unless people expect the old ways to change. The new normative expectation will be additional motivators supporting the behavior that people have reason to believe has changed. I will discuss next the importance of factual and personal beliefs change, a stepping stone in norm change.
