《社会心理学》课程教学资源（文献资料）Aggression——The Salience of Social Referents - A Field Experiment on Collective Norms and Harassment Behavior in a School Social Network.pdf

ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION The Salience of Social Referents: A Field Experiment on Collective Norms and Harassment Behavior in a School Social Network Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd Princeton University Persistent, widespread harassment in schools can be understood as a product of collective school norms that deem harassment, and behavior allowing harassment to escalate, as typical and even desirable. Thus, one approach to reducing harassment is to change students’ perceptions of these collective norms. Theory suggests that the public behavior of highly connected and chronically salient actors in a group, called social referents, may provide influential cues for individuals’ perception of collective norms. Using repeated, complete social network surveys of a public high school, we demonstrate that changing the public behavior of a randomly assigned subset of student social referents changes their peers’ perceptions of school collective norms and their harassment behavior. Social referents exert their influence over peers’ perceptions of collective norms through the mechanism of everyday social interaction, particularly interaction that is frequent and personally motivated, in contrast to interaction shaped by institutional channels like shared classes. These findings clarify the development of collective social norms: They depend on certain patterns of and motivations for social interactions within groups across time, and are not static but constantly reshaped and reproduced through these interactions. Understanding this process creates opportunities for changing collective norms and behavior. Keywords: social norms, social influence, social conflict, social networks, relational aggression, bullying Classic and contemporary experiments have demonstrated the power of social norms over individuals’ judgment and behavior (Asch, 1955; Blanchard, Crandall, Brigham, & Vaughn, 1994; Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Sherif, 1936). Most experimental studies of social norms test the influence of a perceived situational norm, meaning the perceived social consensus regarding which judgments or behaviors are appropriate in the immediate situation (Miller & Prentice, 1996). These types of social norms apply to that situation only; their influence is not expected to carry over to judgments or behavior in other situations. However, individuals also develop ideas about social norms that apply to a larger collection of situations, situations that are populated by a wider community of people who interact repeatedly. These types of “collective” social norms describe the norms that arise in a school, an organization, or a nation. The social influence, organizational, and cultural psychology literatures provide many examples of collective social norms and their influence on important patterns of behavior and cognition across time. For instance, college students’ perception that binge drinking is common on campus increases campuswide alcohol consumption (Prentice & Miller, 1993). Bullying and harassment in secondary schools is fostered by a perceived social consensus among students that speaking out against such behavior is wrong (Juvonen & Cadigan, 2002). Finally, patterns of counterfactual thinking in Eastern and Western cultures are perpetuated by cultural members’ perceptions of a social consensus regarding the most valued means for achieving ends (Zou et al., 2009). Despite powerful evidence of collective normative influence over individual and group behavior and cognition, very little research addresses how individuals identify these social norms (cf. Kitts, 2003, Shepherd, 2012). To date, psychological research has tested the impact of norms when they are presented to individuals through public opinion data or experimental confederates. To understand the means by which individuals learn about collective social norms in the course of their everyday experience, psychologists can examine the social cues that individuals use to generalize across large numbers of people and situations. These social cues might include particularly salient individuals, behaviors, or public expressions. Identifying the social cues individuals use to This article was published Online First September 17, 2012. Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd, Department of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University. A research grant from Princeton University awarded to Elizabeth Levy Paluck provided support for this research. We gratefully acknowledge the collaboration, generosity, and support of our high school research site, its staff and students, and in particular Kelly Bocuzzo and Alan Paluck, whose energy and dedication made this project possible. We received important feedback from Peter Aronow, Peter Bearman, Hart Blanton, Mina Cikara, Alin Coman, Paul DiMaggio, Donald Green, Deborah Prentice, Matthew Salganik, Ezra Zuckerman, and members of colloquia at the Russell Sage Foundation, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Theorodology workshop at Princeton. Izzy Gainsburg, David Mackenzie, and Ani Momjian provided superior research support. All errors are our own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Green Hall, Department of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540. E-mail: epaluck@princeton.edu Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012, Vol. 103, No. 6, 899 –915 © 2012 American Psychological Association 0022-3514/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0030015 899 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. 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learn about collective social norms is important for understanding the persistence of norms and behavioral patterns in a collective, as well as instances of change in norms and behavior. In this article, we test the hypothesis that highly connected and chronically salient individuals in a community provide cues as to the social norms of the collective. To test this hypothesis, we use a randomized intervention within a repeatedly measured, complete high school social network. Although individuals likely infer collective social norms from a host of cues, theories describing the influence of social reference groups and situational social interactions suggest that certain individuals, or social referents (Sherif & Sherif, 1964), will shape inferences about collective norms significantly more than others. We test the way in which cues from these social referents are transmitted to their peers through everyday social interaction, specifically, interaction that is frequent and personally motivated, as opposed to interaction shaped by institutional channels like shared classes. Social Referents Provide Cues to Collective Norms How Individuals Identify Social Norms Social psychological theory predicts that individuals form their ideas about what is socially normative in a social context or within a community by observing other people’s public behavior. The power of that perceived norm over individuals’ own cognition or behavior depends on the extent to which they perceive the norm to be universally endorsed, and the extent to which they feel personally tied to the context or community (Miller & Prentice, 1996; Sherif, 1936). For example, when an individual observes a person littering in a parking lot, the littering behavior may not serve as a cue to a littering norm if there are signals that the behavior is not universally endorsed, such as another person picking up trash or a previous experience in the parking lot in which no one littered (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990). Additionally, individuals may reject the influence of norms belonging to a context or community if they are motivated to define their identity in opposition to that context or community, as in the case of “fringe groups” (Blanton & Burkley, 2008; Blanton & Christie, 2003), or if they feel they do not fit the community prototype, as in the case of female undergraduates at a traditionally male university (Hogg, 2010; Prentice & Miller, 1993). In sum, public behaviors influence perceptions of social norms when the behaviors seem broadly endorsed and when the perceiver feels personally tied to the context or community in which the behavior takes place. Given these conditions, it is reasonable to ask whose behavior contributes the most to individuals’ perceptions of norms in a context or community. This question is particularly relevant for understanding how individuals infer norms within a wider community where individuals interact repeatedly across different situations. Are there particular types of people in the community whose behavior is more likely to be perceived as universally endorsed, and as personally relevant? Do certain people “count” more when individuals draw inferences about collective norms in the course of their everyday lives? How Individuals Identify Collective Norms Through Social Referents When individuals form an impression of how most people in a community feel about, for example, race relations, they do not comprehensively account for each person’s apparent racial attitudes and compute an unweighted modal or average collective position. We revisit and test the long-standing hypothesis that the public behaviors of highly connected and chronically salient actors in a group, called social referents, provide normative cues regarding what is acceptable and desirable for group members (Sherif & Sherif, 1964). For each individual group member, social referents are most influential over stable perceptions of collective norms when the individual is personally connected to the referent and repeatedly observes the referent across situations. Personal connections are critical to referents’ influence because perceivers infer more social information from and are more influenced by people with whom they have an affinity or felt connection (Hardin & Higgins, 1996; Hogg, 2010). Repeated observation of social referents in various situations is important because individuals do not identify norms on the basis of their accumulated experience and knowledge (Miller & Prentice, 1996), but rather on the basis of immediate context in which the norms are relevant (Kallgren, Reno, & Cialdini, 2000; Miller & Prentice, 1996). We examine the influence of two types of social referents in a collective. One type is a widely known individual, who has many ties to individuals across the network (i.e., the ties are not clustered among a subgroup, but span several subgroups in the network). Widely known people are personally connected to many members of the community. As a result of their reach across the social network, and, relatedly, because they are often respected and considered popular by others, their behavior may be identified as representative of the collective group identity. Additionally, due to the extent of their relations in the network, their behavior is likely to be more frequently observed across situations in the community. A second type of person who is theoretically well positioned to shape perceptions of collective norms is a leader of a subgroup, or “clique,” within the community, such as a friendship clique in a school. These individuals have a large number of social relations, but their relationships are largely concentrated within a subgroup in which the subgroup members have social relations with one another. A clique leader’s behavior is frequently observed by clique members because they interact with one another more often than they do with others in the community. Also, leaders of cliques are highly connected to other members of the clique. In particular, connections in a clique may be marked by high levels of identification with the clique leader referent, because membership in cliques grant individuals a feeling of uniqueness as well as one of belongingness (Pickett, Silver, & Brewer, 2002). Thus, the norms inferred within an individual’s subgroup are less likely to be rejected as unrepresentative of the individual’s identity (Blanton & Christie, 2003). Widely known individuals and leaders of cliques should have a greater influence than other members of a community over perceived collective norms. However, each type of individual may also have a slightly different impact. For example, due to their relatively wider reach across the social network and their status in the group, widely known people may seem more relevant for inferring collective norms as they may be perceived as more representative of the group as a whole. At the same time, clique leaders may be particularly capable of influencing personal attachment to collective norms and enforcing costly or socially riskier behavior, due to their greater personal relevance to group members 900 PALUCK AND SHEPHERD This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly

and to group members’ tightly knit and frequent interactions allowing for ongoing monitoring and reinforcement. Overall, understanding who can influence individuals’ perceptions of collective social norms may help us to understand how to change chronically perceived norms and behavioral patterns in a community. The main goal of this research was to understand whether and through what channels these theoretically identified social referents of a community can significantly shape their peers’ perceptions of collective norms in their community. Importantly, we also examine whether those changes in perceived collective norms are accompanied by changes in the behaviors that are prescribed or proscribed by those norms. The Present Research: Measuring Social Referents’ Influence Across a Social Network We investigate the source of cues about a problematic norm within a community, specifically, the norm of peer harassment in a high school. Using a saturated survey and social network analysis to map the entire social network of the school, we are able to identify social referents at the school, both widely known and clique leader social referents. We randomly assign a subset of these social referents to an intervention involving a schoolwide assembly in the fall and public reminders of the assembly for the rest of the year, in which the intervention social referents demonstrate their opposition to harassment and support for behavior that can de-escalate conflict. The influence of the intervention social referents is measured net of the influence of the remaining control social referents. Specifically, we test whether the intervention social referents’ public behavior changes their peers’ perceptions of the school norm of harassment and behavior. We further predict that intervention social referents will influence their peers through the mechanism of everyday social interaction that is frequent and personally motivated. Specifically, interactions that students initiate with social referents should be the most influential channel for perceiving cues about collective norms, compared with incidental or institutionally driven interaction. When students are personally motivated to interact with social referents in or outside of the classroom, social referents’ behavior should be noticed more and weighed more heavily in students’ inferences about the collective norm, relative to interactions that are a consequence of a school administrator’s decision to put students in the same class or study hall. In addition, we hypothesize that the more frequent the interactions with social referents, the stronger their influence on their interaction partners’ perceptions of the collective norm. Thus, we use reports of students’ self-selected social interactions at three points throughout the year to test the idea that the influence of ties to intervention social referents will be relatively greater if students are exposed to them in frequent and personally motivated everyday social interaction. In sum, our research questions are: Does greater social interaction with intervention social referent students over the course of the school year significantly shape their peers’ perception of the school’s collective social norm regarding harassment? Does greater social interaction change their peers’ harassment behavior? In this research, we explored how collective norms are identified by testing whether the widely known and clique leader students’ behavior can communicate a more tolerant collective norm through everyday social interactions. In doing so, in this research we answer the more general call to understand the wider consequences of social influence within social networks (Mason, Conrey, & Smith, 2007) and follow a tradition of empirical research attempting to understand peer influence within networks on behavior (e.g., Bearman & Moody, 2004; Coleman, Katz, & Menzel, 1957). To our knowledge, this is the first time that influence across a naturally occurring social network has been tested with an experiment, in which influence agents are randomly assigned to treatment on the basis of their position in the network. As such, the study is one of the first to measure the causal influence of certain individuals in a network on collective norms and behavioral patterns through the course of everyday interaction. Prejudice and Harassment in Schools Many high schools in the United States and abroad report harmful and cyclical patterns of student-to-student harassment in schools (e.g., Graham, 2006; Juvonen & Galván, 2008). The harassment is often cyclical in the sense that harassment prompts a response from the target and often from the targets’ friends, which triggers a reaction from the initial student and her or his friends, thereby broadening and fueling the behavioral cycle. The type of harassment varies from school to school, but common themes include harassment on the basis of ethnic or racial identity, appearance, sexual orientation, or rumored sexual activity. Increasingly, harassment takes place online, on social networking sites like Facebook, and through phone texting, but it also occurs verbally in person and sometimes physically. Although many intervention programs label such behavior bullying, adolescents often resist this label and instead choose descriptors like “being mean” and “making drama” (Faris & Felmlee, 2011; Marwick & Boyd, 2011). Crucially, harassment behavior is not strongly related to students’ personal values or attitudes regarding tolerance generally or harassment specifically. Harassment is typically widespread throughout the social network of a school; students at almost all levels of the school hierarchy participate (Faris & Felmlee, 2011), despite variation in their personal orientations toward harassment. This suggests that changing patterns or levels of harassment in a school will not come from changing students’ private attitudes, values, or beliefs, which are the target of many existing antibullying interventions. Instead, researchers have described high rates of harassment behaviors as stemming from perceptions of a social consensus concerning harassment behaviors at the school (e.g., Juvonen & Cadigan, 2002). For example, many students do not personally like or approve of harassment, but their private attitudes do not translate into behaviors aimed at discouraging harassers, defending victims, or withdrawing from the cycle of harassment by refusing to engage in conflict or that of their friends. Students interpret their peers’ failure to take action as implicit endorsement of the harassment. In other words, peer behavior communicates social norms regarding the acceptability of harassment and the unacceptability of standing up against it or withdrawing from it. These perceived social norms motivate harassment and inhibit behaviors that deescalate conflicts (see also Prentice & Miller, 1993). The chronic activation of harassment norms in schools is perhaps an important feature of what is frequently described as a schoolwide “culture of harassment” (Bradshaw & Waasdorp, 2009). 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Method Experimental Context We studied a small public high school (N 291) that drew students from urban and suburban areas of Connecticut. Teachers had observed high levels of harassment among students in previous years, and as a response, the school invited the AntiDefamation League (ADL) to run an intervention program called “Names Can Really Hurt Us” (referred to below as NAMES). The NAMES intervention prepares a small group of selected students to present their experiences of and reasons to oppose harassment in a schoolwide assembly. Peer harassment is defined as verbal or physical abuse and social ostracism among peers. Prior to the intervention, we analyzed the complete pattern of relationships among students (the school’s social network) in order to identify a pool of widely known and clique leader social referent students and then randomly assign a subset of those social referents to participate in the program. Participation included leading the schoolwide assembly and, later, providing reminders about the themes of the program through publicity campaigns during the remainder of the school year. We first describe the saturated school survey to illustrate how we identified the social referent students within the school’s social network while measuring students’ perceived norms, beliefs, and experiences of harassment prior to the intervention. Schoolwide Survey: Social Network and Norms Measurement One week after school began in September, we administered a survey during a single class period to every student in the school (N 260 due to absences on the survey day and in the days following; 56% female; 44% African American, 23% Latino, 21% White; 59% of students were new to the school that year; see Table 1A). Parents signed a consent form for their child to participate, and students also provided informed consent. The survey consisted of four parts: demographic information, questions about relationships with other students at the school (our social network questions), personal beliefs about and experiences of harassmentrelated events at the school, and perceptions of collective social norms regarding harassment at the school. On the basis of previous work on harassment and bullying in schools, and on initial qualitative work at the school, we used the term making drama to refer to harassment in all relevant survey questions (which was defined in the survey as “talking behind the backs of other students or to their faces in a mean or rude way; spreading rumors by text, Facebook, MySpace posts, or instant messaging (IMs); giving other students mean or rude looks in the hall”; Marwick & Boyd, 2011). Network questions. Six questions elicited students’ relationships with other students at the school. Four asked about friendships at the school in behavioral terms (“With whom did you spend time in the last week?”; “With whom did you communicate online last week?”; “Who would defend you if you were having ‘drama’ with other students?”; “Who would you talk to if something bad or upsetting happened to you?”). Two questions elicited nominations of high status peers (i.e., students at the school “who you really respect” and “who you think are most popular”). We followed recommended procedures (Marsden, 2005) by providing each student with a complete roster of students in the school, arranged by grade, sorted alphabetically by first name, and numbered. Students used the numbers1 to nominate as many students as they wanted for each question. We use the spending time together question, measured two more times throughout the year, to approximate the frequency with which a student is exposed to the behavior of their peers, and to indicate with whom students are personally motivated to spend time. Frequent and personally motivated everyday interaction is the proposed mechanism through which social referents influence perceived collective norms and behavior. We use this particular question to map the social interactions through which we trace the influence of the intervention and control social referents. Collective norms. We used a series of eight questions to measure perceptions of prescriptive norms regarding harassment at the school, specifically, perceptions of student approval of harassment, of behavior that can deescalate harassment, and of students’ rationale for harassment. First we assessed an overall prescriptive norm of harassment: “How many students at [school] believe it’s normal when students start drama or any other kind of conflict with other students?” For norms regarding behavior to deescalate conflict, we asked: “How many students at [school] believe it’s wrong, or would criticize you, if you tried to stop other students from starting drama?”; “. . . believe it’s wrong, or would criticize you, if you did not defend your friends when someone else was making drama for them?”; “. . .believe it’s wrong, or would criticize you, if you ignored rumors about you, rather than defending yourself?”; “. . .believe it’s normal to mind your own business when other students are starting drama for people?” and “believe it is important to defend your friends when someone is making drama for them?” As we learned through interviews at the school, behaviors that deescalate conflict are not necessarily interventionist behaviors in which students defend their friends or step into the middle of conflict. One student stated: “I can see helping out if someone’s pushing you into a locker, but when they’re saying stuff before class and you’re just like ‘don’t talk to my friend like that’ and you start talking too, that’s just starting more problems” (Student DE, personal communication, June 2011). Instead, teachers and students identified behaviors like stepping back, minding one’s own business, and not grouping together to defend friends as behaviors that prevent future conflict. We next assessed norms regarding a rationale for harassment behavior: “How many students at [school] believe that sometimes students deserve to have rumors spread about them?”; and “. . .believe that students are seriously negatively affected when they are targeted by rumors, gossip, or other drama?” Students responded to these questions using a pictogram with six options, each of which featured a collection of outlined stick figures. The proportion of shaded figures in each picture represented the percentage of students at the school who believed or supported the statement (1 Nobody, no shaded figures, 3 1 In the first wave of the survey, students were asked to write down both the name and number of other students they nominated in network questions. Due to students’ concerns about the confidentiality of the information, we only asked them to record the other students’ identification numbers and not their names, in Waves 2 and 3 of the survey. 902 PALUCK AND SHEPHERD This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly

About 50%, half-shaded figures, 6 Almost everybody, all shaded figures). This method for eliciting perceptions of social norms differs from the method most commonly used where researchers ask for perceptions of what the “average person” in the group does (e.g., Prentice & Miller, 1993). By using percentages, we hoped to capture students’ perceptions of the sentiments of the collective as opposed to sentiments of each individual’s idea of a prototypical group member. For the prescriptive norm questions, the success of the intervention would be evidenced by perception of less widespread approval for behaviors supporting harassment. Put differently, students would perceive behaviors that deescalate conflict such as stopping others from “starting drama,” refusing to participate in the conflicts of friends, and ignoring instead of engaging rumors about oneself to be more desirable and normal at the school. Answers to the questions pertaining to a rationale for harassment indicate a successful intervention when students perceive a widespread belief that students are seriously negatively affected by gossip and rumors, because this perception should make students less likely to participate in harassment. Another series of questions addressed students’ perceptions of descriptive norms (e.g., “How often do students. . . spread rumors about students at [school],” “. . .forward or send emails, IMs, or texts to other students to gossip about or threaten someone,” “threaten [one another] with physical violence,” “. . .act as a negotiator to calm down a conflict or break up a fight,” and “. . .stand up for someone when they are being insulted or harassed?”). Students responded to these questions using a 4-point scale (from 1 Never to 4 Several times a week). We consulted with school staff and students in order to capture school-specific issues and appropriate language. Personal beliefs and experiences. Three questions addressed personal beliefs about and experiences with harassment at the school: “Do you think there is a problem of too many students gossiping, spreading rumors, or making drama for each other?”; “Do you personally have a problem of students gossiping, spreading rumors, or making drama for you?”; and “Do you think that students are seriously emotionally affected when people gossip or spread rumors about them or when people make drama for them?” Students responded using a 4-point scale (from 1 Not at all to 4 Very much). Second- and third-wave surveys. We administered the social network and norms survey described above to the entire school two more times: 1 week after the intervention described below (N 250, 57.2% female) and at the end of the school year (N 220, 58.18% female). A total of 278 unique students completed at least one wave of the survey; 190 students completed all three waves. We added questions to Wave 3, described below. Close friend norms. Wave 3 reframed two of the collective prescriptive norms questions to determine how students perceived the norm within their close friendship group. Specifically, we asked “How many of your close friends believe that it’s normal to start drama or any other kind of conflict with other students,” and “. . .believe it’s wrong, or would criticize you, if you tried to stop other students from starting drama?” Students responded using the 6-point pictogram. Cognitive salience and endorsement of the program. As a measure of the cognitive salience of the program and of the intervention social referent students who participated in it, Wave 3 of the survey assessed students’ memory for the hallway intervention poster slogans (described below) by asking students to recall one of the slogans. At Wave 3, students also recalled how many of their good friends had participated in the NAMES intervention. As a measure of students’ endorsement of the underlying themes of the program, Wave 3 asked each student to vote on whether a program like NAMES should be implemented the following year at their school. Identification of Social Referent Students We used social network questions from the first survey to construct the complete network of relationships among students at the school. The complete network of student relationships is represented by a square matrix in which the rows and the columns contain every student in the school. If, for example, Student 125 reported that she spent time with Student 130, then the cell at the intersection of row 125, column 130, would receive value 1. We combined the results of the four friendship-related questions into one matrix. In a different matrix, we combined the results of the two status questions. We combined questions in order to create robust networks that captured several dimensions of relationships, and because some questions elicited higher response rates than others. The combination of questions was not additive; if Student A named Student B as someone she spent time with last week and as someone who would defend her, the cell at the intersection of Students A and B in the friendship matrix has a value of 1. Within this matrix, we identified widely known students as those students who were nominated as being high status by many other students (i.e., high indegree in the status matrix; see Wasserman & Faust, 1994), and whose status matrix associates did not have many status connections to one another (i.e., low local clustering coefficient in the status matrix; Wasserman & Faust, 1994). This metric verifies that widely known students serve as social referents for a wide swath of students at the school, rather than for a smaller, interconnected group of students. We identify clique leaders as those students who received many friendship nominations (high indegree in the friendship matrix), and whose connections also shared friendship connections to each other (high local clustering coefficient). This designation of clique leaders indicates that they served as leaders of tightly interconnected groups in the school. This strategy for identifying social referents is superior to one in which students nominate people who they believe to be “widely known” or “clique leaders,” because individuals have different thresholds for who should be included in such designations, rendering their nominations less broadly comparable (Marsden, 2005). We stratified this pool of widely known students and clique leader students by gender and grade. To improve our ability to detect the distinct influence effects of each type of student on their friendship connections, we excluded from the pool five students of each type who had direct ties to a student of the other type, for example, a clique leader who was directly tied by friendship to a widely known student. We are unable to ensure that the two types of students remain unconnected over the course of the school year, but this does not trouble our overall analytic strategy, which is to measure the effect of the total number of ties to intervention social referents relative to the total number of ties to control social referents. SALIENCE OF SOCIAL REFERENTS 903 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly