# **1 Introduction**

_“A rebel with a cause is someone who breaks rules that should be broken. They break rules that hold them and others back, and their way of rule breaking is constructive rather than destructive. It creates positive change.” Gino (2018)_ Gender norms are shared expectations about how women and men should behave in a social group or culture. Restrictive or discriminatory gender norms creates social pressure that can adversely affect women and girl’s decisions around education, labor supply, marriage and fertility which are critical for women’s empowerment (Jayachandran, 2021). Shifting gender attitudes and norms to encourage greater female engagement in education and incomegenerating activity and male involvement in household production is necessary for reducing gender inequalities and to promote economic growth and development (Duflo, 2012).

Recently economic research has put greater emphasis on understanding how gender norms are formed (Alesina et al., 2013; Jayachandran, 2021), measured (Bernhardt et al., 2018; Bursztyn et al., 2023), and changed (Dhar et al., 2022; Bursztyn et al., 2020). Programs that directly challenge restrictive gender norms have also begun to be rigorously evaluated in some low- and middle-income country contexts. For example, interventions designed to change gender attitudes and norms (e.g. evidence from India by Dhar et al., 2022) or change how existing norms are perceived (e.g. in Saudi Arabia by Bursztyn et al., 2020) have been found to increase gender equitable attitudes and support women’s work. Similarly, programs that engage men in sessions of critical reflection on fatherhood and caregiving have led to higher levels of male participation in childcare and household tasks (e.g. in the Democratic Republic of Congo by Vaillant et al., 2020).

Our interest in this paper is to advance this nascent literature. We devise innovative behavioral games to examine social dynamics to supplement the survey data from a randomized controlled experiment of a gender norms intervention for adolescents in Somalia. For norms to be _social_ they must be shared by other people and partly sustained by their approval and disapproval (Elster, 1989). The behavioral games were designed to measure normative social influence, drawing insights from the field of social psychology which has long argued for the importance of social contexts and interactions for decision-making. We build on a series of conformity experiments developed by Asch (1951, 1952).<sup>1</sup> Using a novel lab-in-the-field experiment we modify Asch’s experiments to measure conformity in attitudes among adolescent peers who are asked to state their gender beliefs both in _private_ and in _public_ . The experiments allow us to study whether and how gender attitudes differ if expressed privately or publicly; and provide a causal link between the gender norms program and the observed behaviors among the study sample, albeit in a lab-in-the-field setting.<sup>2</sup> We also examine the marginal effect of a complementary gender norms intervention to parents on adolescent attitudes and behaviors.

In economics, conformity has been modeled in theory by Jones (1984); Bernheim (1994); Akerlof (1997), and shown to exist in educational settings (e.g. in Bursztyn and Jensen

> 1Asch provided provocative experimental findings of conformity by showing how easily individuals’ judgment can be manipulated in a group setting using a line-match exercise (Asch, 1951, 1952).

> 2 We use the experiment to observe actual behaviors and to address concerns that self-reported survey findings may reflect some social desirability bias.

2