This paper evaluates a series of programs, run by a company called OPOWER, to send Home Energy Report letters to residential utility customers comparing their energy use to that of their neighbors. Using data from randomized natural …eld experiments at 600,000 treatment and control households across the United States, I estimate that the programs reduce energy consumption by 1.1 to 2.8 percent ...

The use of social sanctions against behaviour which contradicts a set of informal rules is often an important element in the functioning of informal institutions in traditional societies. In the social sciences, sanctioning behaviour has often been explained in terms of the internalisation of norms that prescribe the sanctions (e.g. Parsons 1951) or the threat of new sanctions against those who...

Dixon et al. suggest that the psychological literature on intergroup relations should shift from theorizing "prejudice reduction" to "social change." A focus on social change exposes the importance of psychological theories involving collective phenomena like social norms and institutions. Individuals' attitudes and emotions may follow, rather than cause, changes in social norms and institution...

This research evaluated the efficacy of a high-intensity social norms media marketing campaign aimed at correcting normative misperceptions and reducing the prevalence of drinking and driving among 21-to-34-year-olds in Montana. A quasi-experimental design was used, such that regions of Montana were assigned to one of three experimental groups: social norms media marketing campaign, buffer, and...

To be effective, criminal justice policies should affect the underlying social norms for which the policies were enacted. This study sought to determine whether public perceptions of criminal justice policies on domestic violence affected social norms. Two waves of data were collected via a telephone survey where a random probability sample of 973 residents was drawn from 4 communities. A struc...

Internalization is at study in social-behavioural sciences and moral philosophy; lately, the debate was revamped within the rationality approach to the study of cooperation and compliance because internalization is a less costly and more reliable enforcement system than social control. But how does it work? So far, poor attention was paid to mental underpinnings of internalization. This article...

This study examined whether the effect of social group norms on 7- and 10-year-old children's aggression can be moderated or extinguished by contrary school norms. Children (n=384) participated in a simulation in which they were assigned membership in a social group for a drawing competition against an outgroup. Participants learnt that their group had a norm of inclusion, exclusion, or exclusi...

In this paper, we consider the design of normative multiagent systems composed of both constitutive and regulative norms. We analyze the properties of constitutive norms, in particular their lack of reflexivity, and the trade-off between constitutive and regulative norms in the design of normative systems. As methodology we use the metaphor of describing social entities as agents and of attribu...

In multiagent systems, social norms is a useful technique in regulating agents’ behaviors to achieve coordination or cooperation among agents. One important research question is to investigate how a desirable social norm can be evolved in a bottom-up manner through local interactions. In this paper, we propose two novel learning strategies under the collective learning framework: collective lea...