Study says shifting minds may be key to shifting behaviors

Social norms and behavioral rules, even when outdated, are often resistant to change, but a recent paper by two UB philosophers argues that lasting shifts might be achieved by redirecting the effort to change away from the troublesome norms themselves and toward the mental frameworks supporting them.

At times, direct revision of a given rule is most effective, yet there are cases when it is more practical to alter how people interpret a given situation. The authors present both a conceptual lens and a set of practical tools to think more clearly about which strategy is likely to succeed when trying to change norm-governed behavior.

“Our framework helps clarify which path is more feasible in a given context and what kinds of trade-offs each approach involves,” says Justin Bruner, associate professor of philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences.

Bruner says the model has broad relevance for anyone interested in social change.

“Whether the goal is to reduce tax evasion, shift norms around gender and race, or improve public health, it is often crucial to ask how people are framing the situation in the first place,” he says. “If the mental framework, or schema, underlying the rule is misaligned, then even well-crafted revisions will fail to gain traction.”

The paper, co-authored by Ryan Muldoon, professor of philosophy, was published last month in the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs.

Social norms around smoking serve as an example. A practice, like smoking, once seen as cool is now widely viewed as unhealthy or even gross.

“Places like bars, planes and university campuses are now understood as inappropriate spaces for smoking,” says Bruner. “It’s not that our definition of a public space has changed, but rather our conception of which public spaces are suitable for smoking.

“That shift in thinking has helped reshape behavior, leading to less public smoking and reduced exposure to second-hand smoke.”

But knowing which path to pursue isn’t always obvious, since behaviors are intertwined with their frameworks.

“There’s an interdependence where what I do and what rules I adhere to are going to be a function of what I think you’re going to do,” says Bruner. “It’s hard to unravel the schema from the rule.”

As with the smoking example, Bruner and Muldoon’s framework similarly attempts to offer a dynamic roadmap, adaptable to specific situations, that suggests the best pathway for positive social change.

Implementation often comes down to an intervention that relies on what social scientists call “assortment,” the tendency for individuals with similar conceptual frames and dispositions to interact more frequently than random chance. Changing the meeting frequency increases the possibility of unknotting the threads holding rule-schema pairs. 

“We see this in a lot of real-world interventions, from the civil rights era to today’s World Bank,” says Bruner. “These interventions involve gathering a community, observing the bad norm and considering possibilities of a good norm.”

This research is part of a $2.5 million grant the faculty of UB’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics program received last summer from the John Templeton Foundation. The innovative project is demonstrating how diversity, disagreement and dynamism are crucial resources for fueling liberal institutions in an open society.

“Liberalism, the political philosophy focused on individual rights, political equality, freedom and consent of the governed, is at its core very much about default permissions,” says Bruner. “In a liberal society, if the default position leads to bad consequences, we reconsider, legislate or regulate.”

Norms are the informal restrictions that are often placed on individuals, according to Bruner.

“If we really care about liberalism, it is critical for us to not only understand politics and laws, but also informal social norms.

“That’s how we can ensure our rights.”