Promoting social change? Target norms through networks.
By Laura Adams
When public health experts want people to get vaccinated, the behavior they’re targeting is clear, even if persuading people to get the jab takes considerable effort. But when the goal is more abstract—like promoting democratic norms, curbing misinformation, or building a more inclusive public sphere—things get fuzzier. What behavior are we even trying to change?
This question has long dogged programs promoting democracy, human rights, and better governance. Social and behavioral change (SBC) approaches have provided useful tools in sectors like health and education, but they’ve been harder to adapt to values-based issues like inclusion, pluralism, and civic trust. Often programs trying to reduce social stigma or change support for controversial issues rely on awareness campaigns, PSAs, or mass trainings. However, the influence of these kinds of programs is not likely to endure, especially if they are one-off campaigns. And in polarized contexts where identity is on the line, they may even backfire.
The good news is that recent work in behavioral science offers useful ways forward, especially if we’re willing to rethink how change actually happens. Damon Centola’s Change: How to Make Big Things Happen and David McRaney’s How Minds Change are both books that synthesize a vast body of research that helps explain why shifting norms and values is so difficult, and what to do about it.
The upshot: mass messaging may reach more people, but targeting influential people in a network might be more effective when there is resistance to change.
So, why is changing attitudes and behavior so difficult? Initiating change is difficult because our habits and social norms guide us towards maintaining the status quo. Also, according to Centola, sustaining change is hard because it runs into multiple forms of resistance including:
Coordination costs – some changes are not worth the trouble of adopting unless everyone else you know is already using it. Think about Facebook – it wasn’t worth figuring it out until a lot of your friends were already doing it, right?
Credibility concerns – New behaviors are more likely to be adopted if people trust the source and see peers doing the same (“social proof”).
Legitimacy risks – Adopting a controversial stance can risk social standing. People often look for signals that a belief or action is accepted within their peer group before taking it on.
As McRaney also shows, human beings tend to default to beliefs that preserve identity and minimize friction. We filter new information through our confirmation biases and even when we are receptive to updating our beliefs, we tend to revert back to their old beliefs without additional reinforcement. Arguments that feel like moral judgment or social pressure tend to backfire, triggering psychological reactance—the stubborn response people have when they feel their identity or worldview is being threatened. As a decade of research on fact checking and debunking (and far too many endless debates on Facebook posts!) has shown: telling people they are wrong rarely works.
McRaney argues that sustained, empathetic, one-on-one conversations like those used in deep canvassing are far more effective in shifting opinions than corrections or public information campaigns. These exchanges lower defenses, build mutual understanding, and help people reflect on their own reasoning. Yet they are labor-intensive and expensive to scale.
This is where Centola’s network insights become critical.
Centola’s research demonstrates that change doesn’t have to begin everywhere all at once. Social norms spread through networks, and once roughly 25% of a network adopts a new behavior or belief, the rest of the network members often follow. That means that a few well-placed, intentional conversations within a network can trigger a tipping point. However, when designing social change programs, we need enough information about the network to know how close we are to a tipping point and how much additional investment might be needed to push beyond that threshold.
Rather than targeting whole audiences, cultural and political change programs can focus on influential nodes in a network—those with strong ties and high visibility—and use tools like deep listening and peer engagement to shift their perspectives. This isn’t necessarily an easier solution since it requires doing some sort of network mapping to identify who to work with, but in the long run this approach will be more effective and produce changes that are more durable.
And it doesn’t necessarily mean working with “influencers.” Mapping a social media network is relatively easy, but when we work with influencers to spread ideas, Centola shows that we get a return on the investment only if we stick with simple things that do not encounter resistance. Spreading an uncontroversial idea like voter registration through social pressure or a highly centralized influencer network may increase voting behavior, but interventions driving more challenging behavior changes (such as curtailing harassment) means thinking through how to address resistance coming from coordination costs and credibility, as well as making sure that new behaviors are being perceived by peers in the network, thereby shifting the norms.
Social change is less of an information problem than a network challenge. If we combine McRaney’s persuasion techniques with Centola’s insights about the power of networks, it may take just a few targeted conversations within a particular network to trigger a cascade effect across the network. Designing programs that target networks rather than individuals or organizations might be a big change for some, but it may be the key to promoting change that lasts.
