Next, we show that adolescents alter the attitudes they express in a social group setting. In the lab-in-the-field experiment we demonstrate significant social influence based on the gender composition of the peer group to which individuals were randomly assigned.<sup>8</sup> Boys respond to the presence of girls in their group by giving more gender egalitarian responses in private, while the opposite is true for girls. This may mean that girls and boys experience different types of social influence and that social desirability bias might go in opposite directions. We find that treated adolescents were also more likely to stand by their gender egalitarian attitudes when responding in public.<sup>9</sup> Treated adolescents were less likely to succumb to group peer pressure to conform, even when faced with opposing gender views.<sup>10</sup> We find changes in perceived gender norms for boys but not for girls, which suggests normative pressures from peers may be different for boys and girls. However, we find no impacts on the desire to conform in general. This result supports the notion that what we observe are social dynamics specific to gender attitudes and norms taught by the _Choices_ program and is not reflective of conformity in other domains or of outright rebellion - we refer to this as to _rebel with a cause_ .

Furthermore, we examine behavioral outcomes to find that the _Choices_ program increased boys’ reported participation in household chores, and both boys and girls report enhanced caring behaviors towards siblings of the opposite sex. The program also leads to improved mental health outcomes whereby both adolescent girls and boys report a reduction in the emotional and behavioral problems that they face. This finding supports the results described in Baird et al. (2019) who show a correlation between restrictive gender attitudes and worse mental health outcomes among adolescents in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, and in Andrew et al. (2022) who find positive impacts of a norms program on mental health outcomes for girls in India after engaging the wider community.

Our paper makes three important contributions. The first contribution is in the development of measures that capture social influences and norms. This aspect of our work is novel because previous work have mostly investigated the effects of gender norms programs using self-reported survey data. A key concern in evaluating the effects of norms programs on self-reported attitudes is that they may reflect some social desirability bias among the treatment group rather than actual changes in attitudes. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment, we try to link responses to observed behaviors to address this issue.<sup>11</sup> While the reference group in our experiment is a randomly-assigned group of adolescent peers, future work could explore social dynamics with alternative reference groups.<sup>12</sup> 8In the experiment we randomly grouped participants into teams of five with different gender compositions (all boys, all girls, and mixed gender groups).

> 9In the experiment each adolescent was privately interviewed and asked if they agreed or disagreed with three gender attitudes statements and play two line-match games where participants were asked to match lines drawn on paper according to their length in private. This private interview was done with an enumerator asking questions that are typical of self-reported survey questions. We subsequently repeated the two exercises in their team setting. Participants were asked to publicly express their gender attitudes and the line choice in their teams, one after the other, where they could deviate from their private answers.

> 10In our analysis, we consider both the influence of responses in the positions before (position effects) and potential peer effects from teammates who attended the gender norms program ( _Choices_ peer effects).

> 11We also collect a short-form version of the Marlowe-Crowne social desirability scale to check our main results are robust to a social desirability bias correction as in Dhar et al. (2022).

> 12For example, alternative reference groups may include other influential actors such as community el-

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