The Salience of Social Referents: A Field Experiment on Collective Norms and Harassment Behavior in a School Social Network
The Salience of Social Referents: A Field Experiment on Collective Norms and Harassment Behavior in a School Social Network
复制标题
DOI：
10.1037/a0030015
复制
发表时间：
2012-12-01
影响因子：
7.6
通讯作者：
Shepherd, Hana
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Paluck, Elizabeth Levy;Shepherd, Hana
学校中持续、广泛的骚扰可以被理解为学校集体规范的产物，这些规范认为骚扰和允许骚扰升级的行为是典型的，甚至是可取的。就这样。减少骚扰的一个方法是改变学生对这些集体规范的看法。理论表明，一个群体中高度联系和长期突出的行为者的公共行为，称为社会参照物，可能会为个人对集体规范的感知提供有影响力的线索。使用重复的，完整的社会网络调查的公立高中，我们表明，改变一个随机分配的子集的学生社会参考的公共行为改变他们的同龄人的学校集体规范和他们的骚扰行为的看法。社会参照物通过日常社会互动的机制对同伴对集体规范的看法施加影响，特别是频繁和个人动机的互动，与共享班级等机构渠道形成的互动相反。这些发现澄清了集体社会规范的发展：它们依赖于群体内社会互动的某些模式和动机，并且不是静态的，而是通过这些互动不断重塑和复制。理解这一过程为改变集体规范和行为创造了机会。
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.