A Social Norms Intervention Going Wrong: Boomerang Effects from Descriptive Norms Information

By Isabel Richter, John Th⊘gersen, C. Klöckner. Sustainability, 2018

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A large body of research supports the idea of social norms communication promoting pro-social and pro-environmental behaviour. This paper investigates social norms communication in the field. Signs prompting consumers about sustainable seafood labels and informing them about other consumers’ sustainable choices were displayed in supermarkets in Norway and Germany. Seafood sales (sustainably labelled versus unlabelled products) were observed before, during, and after the implementation of the signs. The expected change towards more sustainable choices was generally not found. In Norway, the choice of sustainable seafood increased in the prompt-only condition, but the effect was neutralised when social norms information was added. In Germany, social norm messages lead to a decline in sustainable choices compared to baseline, a boomerang effect. Overall, an increase in the purchase of seafood (both sustainably labelled and unlabelled) was noted during the intervention. A second study was carried out to further explore the finding that consumers were mainly primed with “seafood” as a food group. In a laboratory setting, participants were confronted with stereotypical food pictures, combined with short sentences encouraging different consumption patterns. Subsequently, they were asked to choose food products in a virtual shop. Confirming the findings of Study 1, participants chose more of the groceries belonging to the food group they were primed with. These studies suggest that social norms interventions—recently often perceived as “the Holy Grail” for behaviour change—are not as universally applicable as suggested in the literature. According to this study, even descriptive norm messages can produce boomerang effects.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2e2e1fc6fb13b03ae193c2c0889cfefb78aa63f

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Citations in the corpus

How social norms are often a barrier to addressing climate change but can be part of the solution (2020, background): “, 2014), to environmental sustainability (Reynolds-Tylus et al., 2018; Richter et al., 2018).”
Contingent effects of social norms on tourists’ pro-environmental behaviours: the role of Chinese traditionality (2020, background): “Social norms can be useful in driving PEBs, yet inconsistent results are often identified (Farrow et al., 2017; Richter et al., 2018; Ru et al., 2018), partially due to the mediating mechanism and potential boundary conditions across individuals and/or cultures (Panagopoulos & Der Linden, 2016;…”