A stunning study of the power of political correctness comes from Saudi Arabia.8 In that country, there remains a custom of “guardianship,” by which husbands are allowed to have the final word on whether their wives work outside the home. The overwhelming majority of young married men are privately in favor of female labor force participation. But those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they think that other, similar men do not want women to join the labor force. When researchers randomly corrected those young men’s beliefs about what other young men believed, they became far more willing to let their wives work. The result was a significant impact on what women actually did. A full four months after the intervention, the wives of men in the experiment were more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job.
The best reading of this research is that because of social norms, men in Saudi Arabia are in a sense leashed, and as a result, their wives are leashed as well. Most young men privately support female labor force participation, but they will say what they think, even to their own wives, only after they learn that other young men think as they do. It is fair to say that after the researchers revealed what young men actually thought, both men and women ended up more liberated.
What Matters
Does it matter whether revisions of norms free people to say what they think or instead construct new preferences and values? For purposes of understanding social phenomena, it certainly does. If preferences and values are hidden, rapid social change is possible and nearly impossible to predict.9 When people are silent about their preferences or values, and when they falsify them, it can be exceedingly difficult to know what they are. Because people conceal their preferences, outsiders cannot readily identify them. If people are discontent but fail to say so, and if they start to talk and act differently once norms are challenged and changed, then large-scale shifts in behavior are possible—but no one may have anticipated them.10
The rise of norms against sex discrimination and sexual harassment is an example (which is hardly to say that either has disappeared). The partial collapse of norms authorizing or promoting discrimination against transgender people can be seen in similar terms: For (many) transgender people, the effect is to prevent self-silencing and preference falsification. Similar dynamics help account for the rise of religions,11 the fall of Communism,12 the Arab Spring,13 and the election of Donald Trump.14
When revisions in norms produce new preferences and beliefs, rapid change is also possible, but the mechanics are different. Those who produce such change do not seek to elicit preexisting preferences, beliefs, and values. As norms shift, people are not liberated. Influenced and informed by new or emerging norms, they develop fresh thoughts and feelings, or at least act as if they have them.15 The rise of Nazism is famously complicated and highly disputed, but it can be understood in these terms.16 From one view, of course, it had a great deal to do with the longstanding geographical segregation of Jews and the emergence of suppressed hatred: “In this separation the devil slumbered and in slumber built sinew before Hitler was born.”17 From another view, Hitler was able to spur hatred that did not really exist before. As one former Nazi put it, he was not anti-Semitic “until [he] heard anti-Semitic propaganda.”18
We can also find intermediate cases, in which people do not exactly have antecedent preferences that norms silence, but in which they hear a stubborn, uneasy voice in their heads that they ignore, thinking, Why bother to listen to that? But as norms start to shift, that question has an answer: Maybe it is telling me something important, or something that reflects my real feelings and beliefs. There is a kind of intrapersonal tipping point at which that answer becomes louder and people’s statements and actions change.
My principal examples involve discrimination, but the general points hold more broadly. Consider, for example, cigarette smoking, seatbelt buckling, alcohol consumption, uses of green energy, purchases of organic food, considerateness,19 veganism, the use of new languages,20 polyamory, religious beliefs and practices,21 drug use, and crime. In all of these cases, norms can constrain antecedent preferences; new norms can liberate them or instead help construct new ones (or at least the appearance of new ones). In all of these cases, revisions in norms can result in large-scale changes in an astoundingly short time, including legal reforms, which can entrench and fortify those revisions.
Preference Falsification and Norm Entrepreneurs
Let’s begin with an intuitive account, offered by Jon Elster, who emphasizes that social norms are “shared by other people and partly sustained by their approval and disapproval. They are also sustained by the feelings of embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, and shame that a person suffers at the prospect of violating them.”22 Elster’s quartet is worth underlining: embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, and shame are different from one another. The student at Columbia Law School felt all four. In cases of sexual harassment, that is not uncommon.
Because violations of social norms create such negative feelings, they impose costs on those who violate them. In that sense, they operate in the same way as taxes,23 and the costs might turn out to be low or high. Importantly, however, some people are rebels, by nature or circumstance, and for them defiance of social norms, taken as such, might be a benefit rather than a cost. I will have something to say shortly about the importance of rebels.
In the simplest and most common cases, the objects of discrimination have an antecedent preference, and the norm prevents them from stating or acting on it. The preference may even be falsified (as it was when the law student initially assured me that she did not object to what the professor was doing). In that respect, the objects of discrimination are like actors in a play; they are reciting the expected lines. In cases of sex and race discrimination, that is a familiar phenomenon. The legitimation of the antecedent preference brings it out of the closet; recall here the young men in Saudi Arabia, who had no objection to female labor force participation.
In circumstances of this kind, large-scale change is possible. Suppose that many people within a population object to discrimnation, but because of existing norms they do not say or do anything. Suppose that the objectors have different thresholds for raising an objection. A few people will do so if even one person challenges or defies the norm; a few more will do so if a few people challenge or defy the norm; still more will do so if more than a few people challenge or defy the norm; and so on. Under the right conditions, and with the right distribution of thresholds, a small spark can ignite a conflagration, eventually dismantling the norm.24
There is an important role here for norm entrepreneurs,25 operating in the private or public sector, who oppose existing norms and try to change them. Norm entrepreneurs draw attention to what they see as the stupidity, unnaturalness, intrusiveness, or ugliness of current norms. They may insist that many or most people secretly oppose them (and thus reduce pluralistic ignorance, understood as ignorance about what most people actually think).26 They may describe their experiences. Norm breakers—those who simply depart from existing norms, and refuse to speak or act in accordance with them—may or may not be norm entrepreneurs, depending on whether they seek to produce some kind of social change, or instead wish merely to do as they like.
Norm entrepreneurs might turn out to be effective, at least if the social dynamics, discussed below, work out in their favor. They might be able to signal not only their personal opposition to the norm, but also the existence of widespread (but hidden) opposition as well. The idea of a “silent majority” can be a helpfully precise way to signal such opposition. Importantly, norm entrepreneurs might also change the social meaning of compliance with the norm: if they succeed, such compliance might suggest a lack of independence and look a bit pathetic, whereas those who defy the norm might seem courageous, authentic, and tough.
What Happens
It is important to emphasize that with small variations in starting points and inertia, resistance, or participation at the crucial points, social change may or may not happen.
Suppose that a community has long had a norm in favor of discrimination based on sexual orientation; that many people in the community abhor that norm; that many others dislike it and that many others do not care about it; that many others are mildly inclined to favor it; and that many others firmly believe in it. If norm entrepreneurs make a public demonstration of opposition to the norm, and if the demonstration reaches those with relatively low thresholds for opposing it, opposition will immediately grow. If the growing opposition reaches those with relatively higher thresholds, the norm might rapidly collapse. But if the early public opposition is barely visible or if it reaches only those with relatively high thresholds, it will fizzle out and the norm might not even budge.
These are the two extreme cases. We could easily imagine intermediate cases in which the norm suffers a slow, steady death or in which the norm erodes but manages to survive. It is for this reason that otherwise similar communities can have multiple equilibria, understood here as apparently or actual stable situations governed by radically different norms. In some communities, people may recycle; in others, they may not. In some communities, people might drink a lot of liquor; in others, they might not.
After the fact, it is tempting to think that because of those different norms, the communities are not otherwise similar at all, and to insist on some fundamental cultural difference between them. But that thought might be a product of an illusion in the form of a failure to see that some small social influence, shock, or random event was responsible for the persistence of a norm in one community and its disintegration in another. History plays tricks, but because it is only run once, we do not see them.
Cascades
Some of the most interesting work on social influences involves the existence of informational and reputational “cascades”; this work has obvious relevance to the revision of norms and eventually legal reform.27
For informational cascades, a starting point is that when individuals lack a great deal of private information (and sometimes even when they have such information), they are attentive to the information provided by the statements or actions of others. If A is unaware whether genetic modification of food is a serious problem, he may be moved in the direction of alarm if B seems to think that alarm is justified. If A and B believe that alarm is justified, C may end up thinking so too, at least if she lacks independent information to the contrary. If A, B, and C believe that genetic modification of food is a serious problem, D will need a good deal of confidence to reject their shared conclusion. The result of this process can be to produce cascade effects, as large groups of people eventually end up believing something, simply because other people seem to believe it too. It should be clear that cascade effects may or may not occur, depending on seemingly small factors, such as the initial distribution of beliefs, the order in which people announce what they think, and people’s thresholds for abandoning their private beliefs in deference to the views announced by others.
Though social cascades have been discussed largely in connection with factual judgments, the same processes are at work for norms; we can easily imagine norm cascades (information-induced or otherwise), which may well produce legal reform.28 Some such cascades may be a product of information; some may involve values. In such contexts, many people, lacking firm convictions of their own, may end up believing what (relevant) others seem to believe. Changes in social attitudes toward smoking, drinking, climate change, recycling, and sexual harassment have a great deal to do with these effects. And here as well, small differences in initial conditions, in thresholds for abandoning private beliefs because of reputational pressures, and in who hears what when, can lead to major differences in outcomes.
Availability
The availability heuristic,29 to which I will frequently return in this book, often plays a major role in norm cascades.30 The basic idea is that judgments about probability are often made by asking whether relevant events come to mind. If, for example, a particular case of egregious discrimination receives a great deal of public attention, then people might see or come to believe that such discrimination is widespread. In a variation on the availability heuristic, a single event might come to be highly salient, affecting not only probability judgments but also judgments about morality and norms. With respect to sexual harassment, Anita Hill’s widely publicized allegations about Clarence Thomas had a significant effect on public perceptions of sexual harassment in the 1980s. The #MeToo movement, which started in 2017, is analogous; prominent women, including the actresses Alyssa Milano, Ashley Judd, and Uma Thurman, drew attention to sexual harassment or sexual assault that many women faced, eventually creating a worldwide cascade.
Some people, including Hill and members of the #MeToo movement, serve as availability entrepreneurs; they emphasize particular incidents in an effort to produce an availability cascade, involving facts or norms. In many contexts, the effects of civil disobedience (of norms or law) are greatly magnified by the unduly aggressive responses of official targets; those responses tend to be publicized, and they signal that those who engaged in disobedience may well have been right. Consider the aggressive responses of state and local officials to civil disobedience by civil rights activitists. Martin Luther King Jr. was well aware that such responses could be helpful to the cause.
Thus far the discussion has emphasized purely informational pressures and informational cascades, where people care about what other people think because they do not know what to think, and they rely on the opinions of others, to learn what it is right to think. But with respect to norms, there can be reputational pressures and reputational cascades as well. People speak out or remain silent partly in order to preserve their reputations, even at the price of failing to say what they really think. Suppose, for example, that A believes that climate change is an extremely serious environmental problem; suppose too that B is skeptical. B may keep quiet, or even agree with A, simply to preserve A’s good opinion. C may see that A believes that climate change is a serious problem and that B seems to agree with A; C may therefore voice agreement even though privately she is skeptical or ambivalent.
It is easy to see how this kind of situation might occur in political life with, for example, politicians expressing their commitment to gun rights, to capital punishment, to stemming the flow of immigrants, to same-sex marriage, or to eliminating discrimination against transgender persons (even if they are privately skeptical). Here too the consequence can be cascade effects—large social movements in one direction or another—when a number of people appear to support a certain course of action simply because others (appear to) do so.
A “Down Look”
It is too simple, of course, to say that the objects of discrimination are opposed and silence themselves. Often that is true. But when discrimination is widespread and when norms support it, its objects might see discrimination as part of life’s furniture. In some cases, they might not even feel that their preferences and values have been constrained. Some preferences are adaptive; they are a product of existing injustice. If a victim of sexual harassment genuinely believes that “it’s not a big deal,” it might be because it’s most comfortable or easiest to believe that it’s not a big deal.
Consider Gordon Wood’s account of the pre-Revolutionary American colonies, when “common people” were “made to recognize and feel their subordination to gentlemen,” so that those “in lowly stations … developed what was called a ‘down look,’” and “knew their place and willingly walked while gentlefolk rode; and as yet they seldom expressed any burning desire to change places with their betters.”31 In Wood’s account, it is impossible to “comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness.”32
Wood argues that as republicanism took hold, social norms changed, and people stopped accepting their own lowliness. His account is one of a norm cascade, but not as a result of the revelation of preexisting preferences. Something differ
ent happened; people changed. With amazement, John Adams wrote that “Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated from so many Minds in so short a Time.”33 David Ramsay, one of the nation’s first historians (himself captured by the British during the American Revolution), marveled that Americans were transformed “from subjects to citizens,” and that was an “immense” difference because citizens “possess sovereignty. Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others.”34 Thomas Paine put it this way: “Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of a country. We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.”35
Adams, Ramsay, and Paine are speaking of new preferences, beliefs, and values, rather than the revelation of suppressed ones. How this happens remains imperfectly understood. While the idea of preference falsification captures much of the territory I am exploring, it is complemented by situations in which adaptive preferences are altered by new or revised norms.
Partially Adaptive Preferences
There are also intermediate cases, involving what might be called partially adaptive preferences. These cases are especially interesting, not only because they are common but also because they create promising circumstances for rapid change.
Objects of discrimination, and others suffering from injustice or deprivation, may not exactly accept discrimination, injustice, or deprivation. They might live with it, and do so with a degree of equanimity, thinking that nothing can be done. It is not a lot of fun to beat your head against the wall. In cases of partially adaptive preferences, objects of discrimination are not like actors in a play; they are not falsifying their preferences. But they have a sense that something is wrong. They hear a small voice in their heads. The question is whether they try to silence that voice or instead try to find out exactly what it is saying.
How Change Happens Page 2