Social Norms Training Report

This report summarizes the findings on the second wave of the Penn Social Norms Group (Penn SoNG) open defecation research project, conducted in rural and urban Bihar and Tamil Nadu, India. This research is part of a larger, three-year project designed to identify the social factors that affect one's propensity to engage in open defecation above and beyond infrastructure limitations. In this report, we discuss baseline usage and ownership rates, and how these rates diverge from previous research. We then provide an analysis of the novel social network approach used in this study as applied to open defecation, investigating what types of network members are the most important to individuals when deciding to own and/or use a latrine as well as demographic patterns within these networks. 3

JOURNAL OF CLINICAL AND DIAGNOSTIC RESEARCH

Introduction:In the recent decade, the study of social norms has become popular as it can explain and change harmful social behaviours, such as Open Defecation (OD). Open defecation is is a threat to public health. It causes diarrheal infections. Households formed the unit of study as they constitute an essential social institution to adopt and use latrines. Aim: To compare the social norms of the latrine user and OD practitioners of households with regard to disgust, purity and pollution, latrine and OD beliefs, and the preference for latrines that differ in cost. Materials and Methods: The cross-sectional study was conducted among 486 participants at Aurangabad district, Bihar, India, from July 2019 to January 2020. The district is one of the worst performers in latrine adoption in the country, according to the census of India 2011, Swachh Bharat Mission 2016, and NFHS-5 2019-21 data. A pretested questionnaire prepared by Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) was u...

Behavioural Public Policy

Toilet ownership in India has grown in recent years, but open defecation can persist even when rural households own latrines. There are at least two pathways through which social norms inhibit the use of toilets in rural India: (1) beliefs/expectations that others do not use toilets or latrines or find open defecation unacceptable; and (2) beliefs about ritual notions of purity that dissociate latrines from cleanliness. A survey in Uttar Pradesh, India, finds a positive correlation between latrine use and social norms at baseline. To confront these, an information campaign was piloted to test the effectiveness of rebranding latrine use and promoting positive social norms. The intervention targeted mental models by rebranding latrine use and associating it with cleanliness, and it made information about growing latrine use among latrine owners more salient. Following the intervention, open defecation practices went down across all treatment households, with the average latrine use sc...

Ambiente & Sociedade, 2015

This study aims to contribute to the development of strategies to support the social control of sanitation actions. The current research is based on experiences of social control strategies related to sanitation and policies in other more consolidated sectors, analyzed here in light of the theories of Raymundo Faoro and other social scientists who study social control and related topics. Findings revealed a growing involvement of the executive in participatory bodies, a lack of infrastructure and subsidies for community participation, a tendency toward the technification of the discourse on public policy, an absence of citizenship education, as well as the fragmentation of public policies. The study concludes that it is essential to prioritize flexible strategies which can be adapted to local contexts; to promote citizen participation; to develop interdisciplinary networks for the implementation of sanitation; and to use methodologies which take into account popular demands and know...

Past research has generated mixed support among social scientists for the utility of social norms in accounting for human behavior. We argue that norms do have a substantial impact on human action; however, the impact can only be properly recognized when researchers (a) separate 2 types of norms that at times act antagonistically in a situation-injunctive norms (what most others approve or disapprove) and descriptive norms (what most others do)-and (b) focus Ss' attention principally on the type of norm being studied. In 5 natural settings, focusing Ss on either the descriptive norms or the injunctive norms regarding littering caused the Ss* littering decisions to change only in accord with the dictates of the then more salient type of norm.

2016

Phase 2 report of Gates foundation project on social norms and sanitation in India

2018

I was invited, in November 2012, to present the Descartes lectures at the University of Tilburg. By that time, I had been deeply involved for a number of years in a project that aimed at integrating my theory on social norms with UNICEF's perspective on social change, and decided to present on this experience. This book expands those three early lectures, but it retains the original flavor of a condensed attempt to spell out what norms are, how to measure and change them, and the theory and practical tools that lie beneath this project.

Despite an increased awareness of the harms of littering, many Curacao citizens still show old-fashioned littering behaviour. The aim of the study was to gain insight into and find a possible solution for this littering problem. A population study (N = 356) used a questionnaire to indicate who litters, why littering occurs and what kind of circumstances increase littering behaviour. The main finding was that the biggest litterer is a male resident, younger than 40 years old, has little education, lives in unattended and littered neighbourhood and has little personal obligation not to litter. A solution for the littering problem was sought-after by testing the effectiveness of commitment-techniques and social norms through the Broken Windows Theory (BWT) on decreasing littering behaviour. A field-experiment was developed, containing three treatment conditions (a street cleanup, a public commitment or both) and two control groups. Five littered streets were observed on three consecutive times, counting the amount of litter present in the street. Results indicated that the BWT-approach did not lead to any behaviour change, but that commitment techniques did show a change in littering behaviour and have possible long term effects.