PPE Director, Cristina Bicchieri, and PPE Post Doctoral Fellow, Alexander Funcke Published a new article, Norm Change:Trendsetters and Social Structure, in Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 85, Number 1, Spring 2018.

The explanation of social norms change faces two main challenges. One is to define precisely what social norms are. The social science literature is not very precise in this respect, as different collective behaviors often are conflated under the label “norm.” Here we adopt a definition of social norms (Bicchieri 2006, 2016) that lets us specify the necessary elements of norm change. The other challenge is to understand the mechanisms of norm dynamics. Both individual actions and social structure play a role in norm emergence and change, as the network structure within which individuals interact may foster or even prevent social change. Moreover, individuals are heterogeneous in many respects, including norm conformity. Heterogeneous individuals have different thresholds for action, and thus understanding norm change requires a fine-grained analysis of the distribution of heterogeneous types in a population.

In this paper, we focus on norm abandonment and examine the role played by the initiators of norm abandonment—“trendsetters”—in spearheading change. We highlight the characteristics that make someone a potential trendsetter, model a social norm game where choices are determined by such characteristics, and show with simulations based on our model how the network that trendsetters interact with may help or hinder norm change.