Self-persuading norms: Adding a self-persuasion technique strengthens the influence of descriptive social norms

Abstract

Social norms have been implemented to change a variety of behaviors. Yet, these studies show noticeable dispersion of effects. We suggest that such dispersion is partially due to people perceiving reasons for following a certain norm to be more or less appealing. In testing this proposition, we couple descriptive norms with a self-persuading technique (i.e. the self-persuading norm). We propose that the self-persuading norm operate in two steps: 1) self-persuasion leads to value-matched information, 2) value-matched information is more self-relevant, making the norm more influential. Across three experiments, we consistently found that self-persuading norms are more influential than simple descriptive norms and a control condition. The practical applications are straightforward: adding self-persuasive content seems to strengthen the descriptive norm.