Cristina Bicchieri, “Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Apr 1, 2017 · 56m

Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the close of a musical performance. Some of these collective behaviors are cases of imitation, of doing what others do. In other cases, the behavior is driven by individuals’ expectations about what certain people both do and believe others should do. When confronting real-world cases where groups act in ways that are problematic and harmful, it matters a great deal which kind of mechanism underlies the…