Norms@Risk

From climate change, disinformation campaigns, and the spread of infectious diseases, many of today’s most pressing challenges pose collective action problems characterized by risk. Measures to address these collective action problems could be taken through formal institutions, like laws and treaties, but their large-scale and fast development often makes formal institutions insufficient, unenforceable or too costly, and render informal institutions, in particular social norms, essential.

Still, a significant knowledge gap on the potential of social norms remains: little attention has been paid to conditions that may decrease their efficacy. Norms@Risk proposes risk being one of these conditions and hypothesizes that social norms that evolve under risk are less stable than norms that evolve in conditions of no risk. While norms have been shown to tighten under risk, when risk decreases they instead loose in strength and cooperation levels go down. Neglecting these feedback loops between risk, social norms and behavior can lead to unexpected outcomes where norms (instead of enhancing) undermine cooperation under long-term, recurring risks.

Using a multi-discipline, multi-method approach that integrates surveys, meta-studies, and experiments with computational and AI methods, Norms@Risk aims to develop a unified, empirically calibrated theoretical framework of social norms emergence, change, and maintenance under changing risk.

Knowledge from this project will advance our scientific understanding of how social norm change gets off the ground in situations of collective risks and how people respond to ongoing and future global threats, in particular pandemic and climate threats. It will also allow us to identify novel interventions to favor the formation of beneficial social norms that help dealing with global threats, e.g. natural catastrophes, disinformation campaigns and spread of infectious diseases.