At a time when many societies around the world are undergoing significant changes, Professor Nikos Nikiforakis from NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) set out to learn why certain social norms persist, even those that are harmful to a society. Most moments that precipitate social change – both positive and negative — are only understood in hindsight. In newly-published research, Professor Nikiforakis and colleagues report that it is actually possible to anticipate and understand key moments of “social tipping,” or sudden changes that upend social order, and develop policies to encourage socially beneficial change.
Social norms are informal rules about what actions should be rewarded or sanctioned. The ability of societies to adapt norms to changing circumstances can have significant implications for the well-being of its members, especially when norms prescribe harmful behaviors, such as discriminatory norms. In the study “Predicting social tipping and norm change in controlled experiments” published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the NYUAD researchers present evidence from a large-scale lab experiment designed to empirically validate a tipping-point model to help them predict norm change.
Nikiforakis and colleagues found that societies can easily get caught in a “conformity trap,” because beneficial norm change is hindered by a desire to avoid the social-discord costs associated with transitioning to a new norm. They conclude that policies that help societies develop a common understanding of the benefits from change can foster the abandonment of detrimental norms. Promoting tolerance can also facilitate change.
Predicting social tipping and norm change has been a long-standing problem for social scientists. Using a social-tipping game, the researchers observed both instances of norm change and widespread persistence of detrimental social behaviors. Their threshold model correctly predicted the occurrence or absence of tipping in 23 of our 24 experimental societies.
“We observed that societies can fail to abandon norms when they become detrimental without policy intervention, even when it is commonly known that the behavior prescribed by the norm is detrimental for a society as a whole. This calls for us to rethink the role of governments in facilitating social change ,” said Nikiforakis. “The evidence indicates that effective policy interventions can arise from altering the benefits and costs associated with change and should aid to coordinate social expectations about the likelihood of change.” Nikiforakis concluded: “We seem to have identified a model that can help predict social tipping in a broad range of social settings. While more research is still needed, it now seems possible that one day we will be able to predict when sudden social change will occur.”
