DIAGNOSING NORMS We often find ourselves wondering how social practices that cause societal damage, violate human rights, or are plainly inef­ ficient can survive. Think of how corruption holds back eco­ nomic development, erodes public confidence in government, and undermines the rule of law and fair competition, or how child marriage forces girls out of education and into a life of increased risk of violence, abuse, ill health, or even early death. What motivates such behaviors, and why do they persist, even in the face of laws that prohibit them? Are these practices sup­ ported by cultural norms? How do economic and cultural structures interact? Which of these questions is most important to address? Understanding the nature of collective behaviors and why people engage in them is critical for the design of ap­ propriate interventions aimed at social change. There are many collective behaviors that are maladaptive, harmful, or violate what we take to be basic human rights. Addressing these behav­ iors requires disentangling the personal, social, economic, and cultural factors that support them and assessing their relative weights in sustaining these practices. Collective behaviors, that is, behavioral patterns shared by a group of individuals, may be studied in a variety of ways. For example, we may explore the functions they perform in a so­ ciety or group and investigate the environments within which they emerge or disappear. Knowing the functions a practice performs, however, does not tell us if those involved in it are aware of them, or if they act in certain ways because of them. We should not make the mistake of conflating the observer's 2 I NORMS IN THE WILD and the actor's points of view. We may think that a social norm maximizes the welfare of its followers, but this may hardly be the reason why they conform to it. Most of the time, par­ ticipants are not aware of the social functions that a practice serves. Alternatively, we may focus on the reasons why people engage in such behaviors by investigating the incentives and constraints that they face when undertaking an established be­ havior or adopting a new one. These two approaches are fully compatible, and the importance of stressing one or the other depends upon our intellectual and practical goals. Especially when wanting to change or promote a particular collective behavior, we must understand its nature and the reasons why people take part in it. In this chapter, I will distinguish between collective behav­ iors that are completely independent, as when they are purely determined by economic or natural reasons, and interdepen­ dent, as when other people's actions and opinions matter to one's choice. 1 I want to differentiate actions that are undertaken because we care about what other people do or think from ac­ tions that we have reason to carry out without regard for other people's behavior or beliefs. These distinctions are important because in order to implement policies to encourage or dis­ courage certain collective behaviors or practices, we need to understand their nature, or the reasons why people engage in them. In what follows, I shall offer a clear and simple way to distinguish between independent and interdependent behav­ iors and among different types of interdependent behaviors. Habits, social customs, and moral injunctions are inde­ pendent, in the sense that they involve undertaking certain actions regardless of what others do or expect us to do. For 1. When I say "independence," I do not refer to outcome-independence: in a purely competitive market, each agent acts independently, but the final outcome is the product of a myriad of individual choices. The market outcome depends on the actions of all the market participants, but this is not the dependence I am interested in. DIAG NOSING NORMS I 3 example, we wear warm clothes in winter and use umbrellas when it rains, independently of what our friends or neighbors do, and we may obey kashrut dietary laws whether or not other Jews respect them. Conventions such as signaling sys­ tems, fads, fashions, and social norms such as reciprocity rules are all interdependent behaviors, and social norms are the foremost example of interdependence. However, as I will make clear later on, not all collective behaviors are interdependent, and not all interdependent behaviors are social norms. This chapter draws on Bicchieri 2006, ch. 1, although some of the details provided here are different from those in the book. Here my aim is to offer simple tools that help to quickly decide whether the collective behavior we care about is a norm or more simply a shared custom, and if it is a norm, what sort of norm it is. Without this knowledge, promoting social change would be difficult, as we would be at a loss about where and how to intervene. The same practice could be a custom, a con­ vention, or a social norm in different populations. Being able to determine why it is followed will help us suggest the most ap­ propriate intervention. In what follows I shall rely on concepts such as expectations and preferences, all of which are relatively easy to measure and handle, especially in light of wanting to conduct experiments or field surveys. How we come to the con­ clusion that a collective behavior is a social norm is the subject of the next chapter, where I will discuss ways to measure norms that are based on the concepts introduced here. Here I shall offer a few static definitions. They are static because in real life, the social constructs I talk about may morph into each other and often do. A custom may become a social norm in time, and a social norm may revert to a custom (think of the use of white wedding dresses). This dynamic pro­ cess merits investigation, but for the moment I will be treating social constructs as separate, fixed entities. This classification will help us diagnose the nature of a practice or action pattern, in turn suggesting the best way to encourage or discourage it. 4 I NORMS IN THE WILD How individuals relate to certain patterns of behavior deter­ mines the pattern's nature. There are highways where most people drive over the speed limit, precincts with low voter turnout, pockets of resistance to polio vaccination, littered environments, countries where bribing is endemic, and cul­ tures where girls are married at a very young age. What drives these behaviors? Are choices independent or interdependent? Understanding the motives behind these collective behaviors is critical to changing them. Diagnosing collective patterns of behavior as interdepen­ dent, and being very specific about the nature of this interde­ pendence, will help us decide what sort of intervention offers the best chance of success. Think of widespread HIV awareness campaigns in African countries, where condoms are freely dis­ tributed to the population, yet the number of newly infected people is increasing. Distributing condoms and relying on information campaigns about the risks of unprotected sex is insufficient if men share a common view of masculinity that glorifies promiscuity and if they refrain from using condoms at home for fear of giving away the existence of "other women." When behaviors are interdependent, we have to consider entire communities, as individuals' choices depend on what people who are important to them do, and possibly also on what they judge appropriate or inappropriate. Think of child marriage, an interdependent practice that many governments and international organizations are actively trying to eliminate. According to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), 100 million girls will be married before the age of eighteen in the coming decade. Most live in sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian Subcontinent. A variety of potential causes have been explored. The parents of child brides are often poor and use marriage as a way to provide for their daughter's future, especially in areas where there are few eco­ nomic opportunities for women. Some families use marriage DIAGNOSING NORMS I 5 to build and strengthen alliances, to seal property deals, settle disputes, or pay off debts. In some cultures, child marriage is encouraged to increase the number of pregnancies and ensure enough children survive into adulthood to work on family land and support elderly relatives. In South Asia, some fami­ lies marry off all their daughters at the same time to reduce the cost of the wedding ceremony. Chastity and family honor are another major reason, as many parents want to make sure their daughters do not have a child out-of-wedlock (Bicchieri, Lindemans, and Jiang 2014). There are a variety of cultural reasons for child marriage, but in most cases, the social pressure to marry very young girls is intense. In India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, some com­ munities have a strong social stigma against girls being mar­ ried after puberty. Often African families report fearing that if girls receive an education, they will be less willing to fulfill their traditional roles as wife and mother, and so it will be diffi­ cult for them to find a husband, with negative consequences for the family. Trying to induce a change in behavior critically de­ pends upon understanding the reasons behind the choices. In many cases such choices are driven by a combination of shared factual beliefs (about the value of education and how best to protect a girl), social expectations (what other families do and think is appropriate), and normative (or religious) constraints (what good parents should do). Let us imagine two separate groups who marry their daughters as soon as they reach puberty. These practices look identical, but th~ beliefs supporting them are very dif­ ferent, and these differences have major consequences for policies aimed at curbing the practice.