# **2 Attitudes, Norms and Conformity**

Before turning to the empirical analysis, we first define key terms and concepts, and discuss their interrelationship when considering the effects of a program that tackles restrictive gender norms.

Social norms are implicit, specific rules shared by a group of individuals on how they should behave. Gender norms, more specifically, refer to how women and men should behave in a social group or culture.<sup>18</sup> We refer to personal attitudes as to what individuals think themselves, and perceived norms are what individuals think others think.<sup>19</sup> Recent studies have emphasized the importance of perceived norms for decision-making (see for example, Bicchieri, 2016; Tankard and Paluck, 2016; Field et al., 2021; Bursztyn et al., 2023). When social norms change, individuals’ perceptions about what others do and approve of could change collectively; although not necessarily uniformly within a population.

Conformity captures how individuals are influenced by what their particular social group thinks. Social norms are often sustained by conformist behavior through multiple mechanisms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in a group, or simply following the lead of others (Young, 2015). In the Asch (1952) conformity experiments study participants are asked to match the correct length of a line. Actors or “confederates” pick the wrong line and study participants are found to be coerced by conformity to also pick the wrong line even if they know it is wrong. Asch (1952) finds that in a situation where an individual is asked to decide on the correct line alone in private, less than 1% make a mistake and pick the incorrect line. However, in group situations with confederates, individuals are wrong 33% of the time. In this context, conformity is a key concept that is defined as a type of social influence involving the tendency to change personal perceptions, opinions, or behaviors in ways that are consistent with group norms.

Conforming individuals may act to restrain their own beliefs if these were to violate prevailing social norms in order to achieve social gains or avoid social penalties. For example, social sanctions may include the prospect of social disapproval, ostracism, loss of status, and other forms of social punishment (Young, 2015). Conversely, non-conformity is the result if individual attitudes or behaviors deviate from the prevailing norm and individuals decide to act or express their personal opinion accordingly. Social conformity is often explained by either peer pressure or information i.e. normative social influence (altering your behavior to fit in with the group), informational social influence (assuming others are better informed) or perceptual error (believing the group gave the correct answer).<sup>20</sup> Norm shifting can eventually occur if there is a sufficient number of individuals who do not conform to a norm so that it becomes evident that a previously held perceived norm does not prevail anymore. For example, Bertrand (2020) proposes that direct exposure to

> 18Norms around the acceptability of women’s work out of the home, roles and responsibilities in the home, women’s mobility, capacity to interact with men and/or the male breadwinner status could all be at play when it comes to a woman’s decision to enter the labor force (Jayachandran, 2021).

> 19Beliefs about what others do are referred to as _descriptive_ norms and beliefs about what others approve of are referred to as _injunctive_ norms in social norms theory (Cialdini et al., 1991; Heinicke et al., 2022). In our measure of perceived norms we are capturing the injunctive norm (what individuals think others might approve or disapprove of) and not the descriptive norm (what individuals think others do).

> 20Sunstein (2019) provides a useful summary discussion in his book “Conformity”.

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