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Contextualizing Social Norms

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Nicabec Casido and Sierra Gonzales

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Summer Projects:

Social Norms Meta-Analysis

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Led by Gregg Sparkman & Elke Weber

DOSPERT Systematic Review

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Led by Johanna M. Matt-Navarro & Elke U. Weber

Environmental Behaviors Meta-Analysis & Systematic Review

Led by Sara Constantino, Johanna M. Matt-Navarro & Elke U. Weber

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What kind of outcome measures does the DoSpeRT (Domain-Specific Risk-Taking) scale predict?

  • What is DOSPERT?�(Blais & Weber) Quantifies risk-taking and risk-perception

How do choices in economic lab games (Prisoner’s Dilemma, Public Goods Games) correlate with real-world environmental behaviors?

  • Public Goods Game: Used to measure real-life willingness to contribute to public goods.
  • Environmental Behaviors: Donating money to an environmental organization, conserving energy at home, etc.

DOSPERT Systematic Review

Environmental Behavior MA

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Social Norms Meta-Analysis

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Note

Norms research has shown that people conform to norms, but these findings aren't uniform and it's unclear what leads to conformity.

Social Norm:

Perceptions of what others commonly do or believe in a given context

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Main research question of the Social Norms MA:

What kind and under what circumstances do social norm manipulations lead people to conform? How can we use this to improve social norm interventions?

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Round 1: Title + abstracts

Round 2: Confirm norm experiment with conformity DV

Round 3 & 4 Prep -

Our Work

Round 3 & 4:

Code

possible

moderators

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"[Actor] + [doing action/holding belief] + [a context].”

“[Hotel guests] + [reusing towels] + [in their room.]”

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Type of Medium Distribution

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Outcome Measure

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After creating a word cloud of the most common words used in the context descriptions, we were able to create 6 content domains to sort the studies into.

We found that, out of 935 studies, there were:

  • 117 studies in General Health
  • 125 were in Substance Use
  • 84 were in Environment
  • 31 were in Politics
  • 103 in Finance
  • 38 in Donation

Context Description Analysis

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Population:

  • 257 studies on “people” or unspecified adults
  • 384 studies on college students
  • 46 studies on individuals under 18

Context Description Analysis

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Conclusion + Next Steps

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Using our analysis, we hope that more can be learned about what characteristics are most commonly used for norm manipulations, which ones seem most effective, and if there less-used manipulations which hold the potential of being more effective than previously realized.

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Thank you to our mentors from all 3 projects we worked on and the BSPL in providing us with this educational opportunity!