  Why do people engage in certain behavior. What are the effects of social
expectations and perceptions of community behavior and beliefs on own behavior.
Given that proper infant feeding practices are observable and have significant
health impacts, we explore the relevance of these questions in the context of
exclusive infant breastfeeding behavior using social norms theory. We make use
of a primary survey of mothers of children below the age of two years in the
Kayes and Sikasso region of Mali, which have a historically lower prevalence of
exclusive breastfeeding. The findings from regression estimations, controlling
for a host of potential confounding factors, indicate that expectations about
the behavior of other community members can strongly predict individual
exclusive breastfeeding. Beliefs about approval of the infant feeding behavior
of the community though are found to be only modestly associated with it. In
addition, mothers who hold false but positive beliefs about the community are
found to exclusively breastfeed their kids. Further, using responses from
randomly assigned vignettes where we experimentally manipulated the levels of
social expectations, our data reveal a strong relationship between perceived
prevalence of community level exclusive breastfeeding and individual behavior.
This result indicates the existence of a potential causal relationship. We
argue that our findings represent an important foundation for the design of
policy interventions aimed at altering social expectations, and thus effecting
a measurable change in individual behaviors. This type of intervention, by
using social norm messaging to end negative behavior, avoids the use of
coercive measures to effect behavior change in a cost-effective and efficient
way.
