In practical terms, social norms are at work when:
Social norms are ‘shared understandings about actions that are obligatory, permitted or forbidden’ which ‘govern many parts of our everyday lives ranging from economic and political decisions to cultural practices and are thus an important element of any social group’. Social norms surveys serve to identify whether a behaviour or collective practice is driven by a social norm, or by other beliefs or factors. The diagnostic tool provided by the approach in this case enhances understanding of people’s expectations and judgments of collective practices, as well as of the role of shared beliefs and social pressures in sustaining them. When these practices are detrimental to society, a social norms approach offers insights for designing interventions to promote collective behavioural change.
Informal rules of behaviour such as social norms are driven by the beliefs we have about how people important to us (for example, parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, supervisors, religious leaders and so on) think and behave, and how they expect us to think and behave. Such beliefs inform how we normally act in society and in specific situations. These rules inform what we understand as ‘normal’ and what we think are the behaviours which are acceptable to the people whose opinions and behaviours matter the most to us. This in turn influences the choices and decisions we make. Social norms are particularly ‘sticky’ and difficult to change because of how they shape collective behaviour; are sustained by mutual expectations; and are reinforced by sanction.
In social norm literature, distinction is often made between the empirical and normative parts of social norms. The empirical part refers to behaviours that are assumed to be common, and the normative part suggests behaviours that are considered acceptable or what people think other people should do. In high-corruption contexts such as Nigeria, people are likely to engage in petty forms of corruption because they believe that others in their community do so too, even though they know and believe that what they are doing is wrong and unacceptable.
With regards to causation, descriptive norms are often more powerful than normative ones in determining behaviour, and can have a compounding effect when overblown narratives of pervasive corruption take root. Evidence from the first national household survey in Nigeria, in 2016, shows that social norms that are accepting of corruption are overstated and without evidence, but that there is nonetheless a widespread perception that ‘everybody does it’, which can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy and ultimately entrench a ‘social trap of corruption’.
