# **<mark>Introduction</mark>**

<mark>Social norms and cultural beliefs are important drivers of economic development outcomes, affecting behavior in domains as varied as health practices, energy conservation, labor force participation, tax payments, rule following and corruption, productivity, and sanitation (Allcott and Rogers, 2014; Datta and Mullainathan, 2014; Dixit, 2017; Hallsworth et al., 2017; Herbst & Mas, 2015; World Development Report 2015; World Bank, 2018). For example, although anti‐retroviral therapy is life‐saving for HIV/AIDS patients and often available free of cost, treatment adherence is challenging (Shubber et al., 2016). One reason is that people living with HIV/AIDS expect that others will judge them when they reveal their illness and live in fear of the stigma (Buregyeya et al., 2017; Shubber et al., 2016; Takeda et al., 2014). Similarly, individuals might not provide sufficient protein to mothers and young children, enroll girls in school, or purchase life insurance, even when those goods are free or low‐cost, because of the influence of social norms (Jacoby & Mansuri, 2011; LIMRA, 2016; Nguyen, et al., 2017; Sunstein, 1996). Households in South Asia and Africa have been observed to acquire latrines but not use them, partly as a result of social norms and cultural practices entailed in their use, as well as the absence of a social norm proscribing open defecation (Bicchieri, 2017; Coffey et al., 2015; Coffey et al., 2016; UNICEF, 2015).</mark> <mark>This research develops a new technique for measuring social norms in the context of an important development challenge: reducing open defecation among rural households. The measurement approach disaggregates social norms into two types of beliefs—</mark> beliefs about <mark>what others do (social empirical expectations), and beliefs about what others believe to be normatively appropriate (social normative expectations). In this approach, social norms are understood to be socially conditional preferences to behave in a given way (Bicchieri 2012, 2016). We also draw on a conception in which social norms are more internalized and drive behavior through their incorporation into central cultural concepts (Brennan et al., 2013).</mark> <mark>In rural Uttar Pradesh, between January‐March, 2017, we first measured the relevant cultural and normative barriers to latrine use, conditional on latrine ownership. We then developed and tested behavioral interventions aimed at weakening those social norms and beliefs to increase latrine use. Our data were gathered across three rounds—focus group discussions to inform the development of the relevant norms and belief measurement instrument, a baseline norms measurement survey, and an endline survey following the pilot intervention.</mark> <mark>Findings from the first two rounds confirmed our hypothesis that social normative and empirical expectations were, in fact, associated with individual behavior and influential elements of behavior change. People’s, especially men’s, normative beliefs were closely linked to what they expected others in their reference group to believe, even though they slightly underestimated the extent of pro‐latrine norms (beliefs) among others. At the same time, narrative analysis revealed that reducing open defecation in the context of rural UP also requires direct confrontation with ‘dirtiness” or “gandagi” (Coffey et al., 2016), and their subsequent associations with latrine use.</mark> <mark>To address these barriers, we piloted two simple informational interventions and evaluated their impact,</mark> at least in the short term, on changing people’s behavior and beliefs around latrine use. <mark>The interventions were focused on re‐branding latrine use by associating it with cleanliness and updating empirical expectations by making information about growing latrine use among other latrine owners salient. Our results suggest that targeting mental models and “marketing” social norms can be an effective and low‐</mark> 2