[MUSIC] Even if people have positive attitudes about what you want them to do they still might not necessarily do what you want. And one reason for that can be that in addition to being influenced by their personal attitudes, they can also be influenced by social considerations, factors connected with people's perceptions of what other people think about what you're doing. Now in fact there can be all sorts of social influences on people's behavior and in this course, I'm gonna focus on two of them. The first one is the person's perception of what other people do. The term of art here is descriptive norm. The descriptive norm is the person's perception of whether other people perform the behavior. What other people are doing. Whether anybody else is doing this. These perceptions can influence behavior. As people come to think a given behavior is more widely performed by others then they themselves tend to be more likely to under take the action. So for example, if I think that everybody else in my neighborhood is recycling then I might well be more likely to. One way of thinking about this is to imagine people saying to themselves I don't want to be the only person doing this. I don't want to be the weird one. I don't want to be the odd ball. And so, notice, even if a person has the positive attitude you want, descriptive norm perceptions might hold them back. I think it's a good idea, but nobody else seems to be doing it, so I'm not going to. Positive personal attitudes, but there's this negative social factor, the negative descriptive norm that's also in play. Well obviously then because this is something that can influence peoples' behavior, it's something persuaders might want to influence. Might in fact need to influence. And the most straightforward way to influence peoples' descriptive norm perceptions is simply to give them descriptive norm information. Tell them what other people are doing. And in fact a number of studies have shown just that. Shown that delivering descriptive norm messages to people can influence their behavior. Here's one example. People can be influenced to vote by learning that some of their Facebook friends have voted. There was an experiment where some Facebook users, but not others, got a little notice at the top of their newsfeed at election time that said these friends of yours have voted. People who saw that their friends were voting were themselves more likely to vote subsequently. Another illustration, paying taxes. Several studies have found that people are more likely to pay what they owe and to pay on time when they've received messages indicating that most other tax payers pay on time and pay what they owe. I mean you can see the basic idea here, people don't always realize what other people are actually doing. People can have inaccurate descriptive norm perceptions and so by giving them accurate information you can shake those perceptions and thereby, influence their behavior. But I should add, descriptive norm messages are not guaranteed to be successful. Now, as an example, consider college student alcohol consumption. Students commonly overestimate the frequency or amount of alcohol consumption by others. They think everybody else is drinking a lot more than they actually are. So, one might think, these inaccurate descriptive norm perceptions could encourage alcohol abuse and so to reduce such problems, we should give students accurate descriptive, norm information. And in fact quite a number of interventions about that have been tried. Interventions conveying accurate descriptive norm information concerning alcohol use. But these kinds of interventions have had mixed success. A lot of the time they just don't have much effect. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. And unfortunately, I'm sorry I have to tell you, we don't yet have an entirely good hand though on just what the recipe is for successful, descriptive, norm messaging. The picture is not yet as clear as we might like. Even so, there's a plainly useful take away here. Namely, think about the potential utility of descriptive norm information. You're trying to persuade somebody to do something. In addition to whatever attitude change efforts you might be undertaking. Ask yourself are other people also doing this and might it be useful to convey that to the person I am trying to influence to let them know that lots of other people, lots of their coworkers, or their peers or other people like them, lots of other people have done it. Because we know descriptive norm messages can work. They're not guaranteed winners, but they're definitely worth having in your toolkit. [MUSIC]
