This critical mass then has incentives to recruit the rest of the audience to sitting. Similarly, if a critical mass of people in an intramarrying group pledge to refrain from FGC, then the knowledge that they are a critical mass makes it immediately in their interest to keep their pledges, and suddenly makes it in everyone else s interests to join them. Without an understanding of the underlying mechanism, the abrupt end of such an entrenched practice by means of a mere public pledge would seem to be nearly miraculous. A peculiar characteristic of a convention like this is that even if each individual in the relevant group comes to think that it would be better to abandon the practice, no one individual acting on her own can succeed. Each person could come to think that sitting is better than standing, but any individual sitting on her own would only make herself worse off.
Enough people have to sit at the same time.
The way to do this is to declare a public pledge that marks a convention shift. Every family could come to think that FGC is wrong, but that is not enough, FGC would continue because any family abandoning it on its own would ruin the futures of its daughters. It must be abandoned by enough families at once so that their daughters futures are secured. I have shown elsewhere that the convention model explains the binding of women s feet in China. The practice was beginning about the age of eight to bend the toes under the feet, force the sole to the heel, and tightly wrap the girl s foot so that as she matured her feet remained tiny, perhaps a mere five inches in length.