Social norms: More details, please

Social norms: More details, please.

The words we use matter. The concept of a social norm exists in many social and behavioral science disciplines and research traditions (1). Because the general term “social norm” is a hypernym, an explicit definition is crucial to discussions of its place and usefulness in solving complex social–environmental issues (cf. ref. 2). In their discussion of incentives, Lubchenco et al. (3) suggest t...

More data, please!

Witwer (1 ) observes in his review of miRNA studies that “data submission was reported at publication for 40% of all articles.” Sadly, the problem of poor data reporting is neither new nor restricted to miRNA data. Poor access to data motivated the 2001 MIAME (minimum information about a microarray experiment) standards in the first place (2 ). In 2008, Ochsner et al. (3 ) reviewed microarray s...

More cases, doctor? Yes please!

The scientific basis of modern clinical practice is founded on the randomised controlled trial [1]. Trials are experimental studies in which two or more selected groups (arms) which may (or may not be) "representative"of the whole population are assigned at random to one or more interventions and sometimes to an inert control (placebo) or compared to standard practice. The idea is that randomis...

Social Norms

Social norms and customs shape many economic decisions, but they have not always been at the forefront of economic analysis. Indeed, social influences were more prominently acknowledged by the founders of the discipline than by neoclassical theorists of the last century. J.S. Mill, for example, argued that custom was a potent force in setting the terms of contracts and also the wages paid to la...

Social Norms