Prevention Week Day 2: Attitudes & Behavior

More About Social Norms

What are They, Exactly?

Greetings again grown-ups! Today, I wanted to delve a little bit more deeply into the concept of the social norm. The term seems pretty intuitive, correct? Social means other people; norm means typical, average. And that’s the broadest category of understanding here: we’re talking about what’s common among people.

However, the amount of meaning beyond that we could unpack can be a little bit staggering. I won't bore you with the whole iceberg, just understand that “what’s common among people” covers a great deal of territory and only some of it applies to youth substance misuse prevention. To get a glimpse of some of that mountain of meaning, however, let's return to our elevator example from yesterday. The questions I left you with were why and how does this work, and I said it had to do with that example. If you’ll recall, we were about to enter an elevator, and saw that among the passengers was one person standing in the corner, facing outward.

I said I would probably not get on that elevator, but I spent some more time thinking about it, and here’s what I’d actually do, in the real world, if I saw someone standing in the corner of an elevator facing outward: I’d check to see if someone else was recording it, because I have different expectations for what’s normal when TikTok is involved, then I’d ‘read’ the situation for any sign that someone is in distress or otherwise in need of assistance, because sometimes odd behavior has health-related explanations. I’m sure you’ve encountered similar, if less obvious, moments in life: seeing behavior that falls outside of your expectations and experiencing a rise in uncertainty about what’s happening in your surroundings. I once bored your kids with a very long piece explaining the evolutionary reasons humans don't like uncertainty; I don't have time to get into it in this space, but I’ll bet you've had enough experience with disliking uncertainty that I don't need to. It’s a warning from our lizard-brains: someone is doing something that people do not normally do; we do not know what other such things this person might choose. This ‘yellow alert’, if you will, gets heightened when we see someone doing something that most of us think people should not do.

And that's the first way to define “social norm” and break it down into smaller categories: in any social setting, there are both behaviors and attitudes/beliefs we observe, or ourselves choose, that will fall somewhere inside or outside of the range we consider to be normal.

Other Ways to Categorize Norms

There are many ways of dividing up these attitudes and behaviors further; each way helps us understand something different about how our expectations of what's normal inform and influence our own choices. For example, “people should not do that” is what is called an injunctive norm. If you've ever heard of an injunction, you have a sense of what an injunctive norm might be: it is an attitude or belief about what people should and should not do. The other side of that coin is called a descriptive norm: exactly what it says on the tin, these describe what people do and believe, whether we think they should or not.

The next way of categorizing norms is to separate the perceived from the actual. This is the first fundamental aspect of the social norms approach to prevention, just the idea that our perceptions of what is normal are not always accurate. It is also a good place to stop so that we can all check in with ourselves about this:

• Have you ever caught yourself thinking/saying, “I thought I was the only one who _____!”
  where the blank is a norm of attitude/belief or behavior that you unknowingly fell inside?
• Have you ever caught yourself thinking/saying, “I thought everybody _____!” where the blank
  is a norm of some kind that you unknowingly fell outside?

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how these misperceptions can guide youth either toward or away from health depending on the specific misperception, but I’m sure you’re coming up with examples now so I won’t belabor the point.

Something I should have said explicitly yesterday is that it is our perceptions of what is normal, rather than what is in fact normal, that dictate our choices of behavior and belief. Given that, I encourage you all to begin doing as I have done since I learned about the social norms approach and, whenever my perception about a norm concerns risky behavior such as substance use, do a quick Google run to see if the perception is accurate.

Because the other way of dividing these attitudes and behaviors is the other essential aspect of the social norms approach that I discussed yesterday: false and accurate. Just as with behaviors, it is possible to mistake whether a given attitude or belief is commonly held among your community. The young ones in your charge very often hope that you will mistake community norms of attitude and behavior when they say to you “everyone else’s parent or guardian lets them” and you can fill in the blanks from there, or “this other teacher lets their class out early all the time.”

This also exemplifies why staying informed about what’s actually common practice around you can be such a vital asset for helping your youth choose health. If you happen to know that the rules in other kids’ homes aren’t much more permissive than yours, you can have a great discussion about what gave your kids the idea that you were the strictest one on the block, why you have set the boundaries you have – and why it is, in fact, the kind of boundary most parents you’ve spoken to also set. Much more on this tomorrow! Just to recap today’s dollar-tour of the social norms approach iceberg:

• Social norm: what most people think (norm of attitude or belief) and do (norm of behavior)
• Descriptive norm: what most people in a given community believe or do
• Injunctive norm: what most people in a given community think is appropriate to believe or do, the “shoulds” and “should nots”
• Perceived norm: what people think a given norm in a community is. Can be false (mistaken) or accurate.
• Actual norm: the norm as reported by some form of research, from “show of hands” polls to community-wide surveys