Theory and practice of social norms interventions: eight common pitfalls.

BACKGROUND: Recently, Global Health practitioners, scholars, and donors have expressed increased interest in "changing social norms" as a strategy to promote health and well-being in low and mid-income countries (LMIC). Despite this burgeoning interest, the ability of practitioners to use social norm theory to inform health interventions varies widely. MAIN BODY: Here, we identify eight pitfalls that practitioners must avoid as they plan to integrate a social norms perspective in their interventions, as well as eight learnings. These learnings are: 1) Social norms and attitudes are different; 2) Social norms and attitudes can coincide; 3) Protective norms can offer important resources for achieving effective social improvement in people's health-related practices; 4) Harmful practices are sustained by a matrix of factors that need to be understood in their interactions; 5) The prevalence of a norm is not necessarily a sign of its strength; 6) Social norms can exert both direct and indirect influence; 7) Publicising the prevalence of a harmful practice can make things worse; 8) People-led social norm change is both the right and the smart thing to do. CONCLUSIONS: As the understanding of how norms evolve in LMIC advances, practitioners will develop greater understanding of what works to help people lead change in harmful norms within their contexts. Awareness of these pitfalls has helped several of them increase the effectiveness of their interventions addressing social norms in the field. We are confident that others will benefit from these reflections as well

Using Incentives and Social Information to Promote Energy Conservation Behavior

Improving the efficiency in the domestic energy consumption has become a showpiece of how behavioral economics can be applied to the field of environmental economics. This study builds upon the literature by providing subjects with individual and social energy performance information at group level in a controlled field experiment setting. We aim to test whether extrinsic incentives accentuate or crowd out the intrinsic motivation to save energy and how heterogeneity in environmental attitudes also impacts on electricity conservation. Besides, we test for the persistence of energy-saving habits after the information is removed. Results suggest that the provision of individual feedback and social information increase energy conserving behavior, with this being most effective among those who signaled in a previous stage preferences for pro-environmental and sustainable living. However, treatment variations indicate that subjects overall fail to maintain “good habits” once the intervention stops, with exception of pro-environmental subjects who continue to consume less electricity in the post-intervention phase. Furthermore, our findings indicate that rewarding groups in a competitive environment may create perverse long-run effects. While providing individual and social information could improve both consumer welfare and energy demand forecasting, the timescale, frequency, and mechanism undertaken require careful scrutiny and planning if these potential benefits are to be maximized and undesirable side effects prevented