Social Tipping Points and Norm Change in Large-scale Laboratory Experiments

This research project will use large-scale laboratory experiments to investigate norm change and provide an empirically validated framework to analyze social tipping points. The authors will study situations where norms, or a lack thereof, damage a society’s welfare: discriminatory norms, norms that curtail female labor force participation, norms that support unhealthy behaviors (e.g., smoking or drinking), or the absence of environmental norms. Understanding how norm change can occur spontaneously and how policy can help such processes is essential for addressing global challenges such as economic inequality, global warming, or public health issues. The social tipping framework developed and tested in this research project will provide an inexpensive way to evaluate policy interventions that aim to alter social norms, such as taxing harmful practices, dispensing information, and incentivizing agents of change who hold prominent social positions and can spread positive change. Another aim of the research project will be to improve how social scientists and large survey companies conduct surveys on socioeconomic issues. Traditional surveys ask for a person's opinion on a topic, but responses may not be truthful. Traditional surveys also ask static questions that are uninformative about whether or not norm change can occur. This project will develop a new method to design surveys with dynamic and incentivized questions that allows researchers to understand the potential for norm change across different social issues. The project’s results will be socially and economically beneficial because they can contribute to a better allocation of resources.

The authors will empirically validate a theoretical and experimental framework to advance our understanding of social tipping points and norm change. The framework combines a theory of tipping points, large-scale lab experiments, and incentivized representative surveys. The main objective will be to organize societal and economic factors affecting norm change in a unified framework. This framework will enable researchers to study social tipping points and norm change depending on a society’s structure, e.g., people’s tolerance toward norm deviations, diversity, social networks, social fragmentation, information and filter bubbles, political institutions, individual beliefs, risk and fairness preferences, and behavioral biases such as the sunk cost fallacy. The framework will serve as a tool to evaluate policy interventions, helping to answer questions like, “Which interventions can raise people’s willingness to get vaccinated?” and “Are more diverse societies more likely to experience positive norm change?” The authors will further leverage the social tipping framework to design a new type of representative survey to determine whether or not a particular society, e.g., Californians, Texans, racial groups, or religious groups, is ripe for change for different social issues such as affirmative action, immigration, or climate change. A crucial methodological contribution of these surveys will be to allow researchers to detect the potential for norm change rather than focusing on static societal beliefs and expectations.