Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The Salience of Social Referents: A Field Experiment on Collective Norms and Harassment Behavior in a School Social Network

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. Classic and contemporary experiments have demonstrated the power of social norms over individuals' judgment and behavior 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 …