Wehrhahn 1
McKenzie-Mohr (2013) explains that in the realm of increasing sustainability behaviors, marketing strategies need to encourage an increase in desirable behaviors while also making sure that there is an encouragement to decrease undesirable behaviors. Using social norms and incentives have both been successful in fostering sustainable behaviors, but the question remains whether these types of strategies can also be applied to other areas. Prejudice reduction is an important social movement in need of developing research-supported interventions (Paluck & Green, 2009) that can help people change their prejudiced attitudes and behaviors.
Social norms can be subdivided into two types: injunctive and descriptive. Injunctive social norms specify information regarding which behaviors are acceptable or unacceptable but descriptive social norms give information about which behaviors the majority of people carry out (McKenzie-Mohr, 2013). So, injunctive norms describe which behaviors are right or wrong while descriptive norms describe what other people tend to do. An example of an injunctive social norm could be a flyer containing information about what kinds of materials get recycled and encouraging people to comply. An example of a descriptive social norm could be the perception that most people recycle if a flyer states that fact in an attempt to encourage people to recycle. Both types of social norms can influence behaviors depending on how the information given is perceived, however in the realm of sustainability injunctive norms appear to have less of an impact unless paired with descriptive norms and the descriptive norm must encourage the desirable behavior (McKenzie-Mohr, 2013).
Incentives can also be used to change motivations to take part in certain behaviors. Incentives are a type of external motivator like rewards for doing the right behavior. Disincentives are another way to change behaviors but rather instead of encouraging good behaviors, disincentives discourage bad behaviors (McKenzie-Mohr, 2013). An example of using incentives could be receiving money for bringing re-useable bags to be used at the store. On the other hand a disincentive could be being charged for each plastic bag used at the store. Both of those examples would encourage people to use re-useable bags (McKenzie-Mohr, 2013).
Using social norms as a means for prejudice reduction is difficult to find in the literature. Some interventions focus on educating participants using injunctive social norms. Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of the mediators between intergroup contact and prejudice reduction. The meta-analysis found that “contact reduces prejudice by enhancing knowledge about the outgroup, reducing anxiety about intergroup contact and increasing empathy and perspective taking” (Pettigrew &Tropp, 2008, p. 922). De Tezanos-Pinto, Bratt, and Brown (2010) demonstrated that attitudes toward minority out-groups changed when other members of the majority in-group had intergroup contact. In other words indirect intergroup contact, having friends or classmates who were part of intergroup contact, helped change perceptions of norms and anxieties. Having individual level direct intergroup contact only reduced anxieties, but did not change norm perceptions (De Tezanos-Pinto et al., 2010). This finding supports the extended contact hypothesis that knowledge of an in-group and out-group member having a close relationship lowers prejudice (Wright, McLaughlin-Volpe, & Ropp, 1997). These studies suggest that possible interventions encouraging intergroup contact could help with prejudice reduction.
Liebkind, Mähönen, Solares, Solheim, and Jasinskaja‐Lahti (2014) conducted a prejudice reduction study in culturally-mixed classes in Finland. Participants were from six secondary schools with ages ranging from 13 to 19 years old. The intervention session given to the experimental group included a presentation on different cultures, prejudice and attitudes. Then there was a group discussion on intergroup friendships, and first-person stories about intergroup friendships written by researchers were read to the group. Lastly there was an active learning session in which participants could share their own stories (Liebkind et al., 2014). The intervention overall was a wide attempt to demonstrate the right behaviors through injunctive social norms. The effects of the intervention were minimal. Participants of both majority and minority groups showed an increase in perceived importance of intergroup contact and this effect was seen most strongly among girls and younger participants (Liebkind et al., 2014). Liebkind et al. (2014) expressed concerns about intermingling of control and experimental groups during class subject changes. Overall, this intervention was not highly successful.
One possible direction to take prejudice reduction could be an intervention that gives personalized feedback and suggestions. Medland (2010) describes an intervention to encourage more sustainable behavior regarding paper waste in the workplace. This intervention gives consumption feedback, pro-environmental behavior encouragement feedback, and injunctive and descriptive norm feedback with the idea that each person has different attitudes and behaviors (Medland 2010). In relation to prejudice reduction, an intervention could include giving participants a preliminary test to assess prejudiced behaviors and attitudes. Based off of those results, feedback to each person will contain information regarding the extent to which they are prejudiced or non-prejudiced. Also, there could be encouraging tips on how to behave non-prejudiced in the future. In addition, social norm feedback would be given by descriptive feedback information demonstrating whether they are outside the norm and behave very prejudiced or behave very non-prejudiced along with injunctive feedback that disapproves or praises these behaviors. The usage of both descriptive and injunctive norms is helpful in avoiding the boomerang effect of non-prejudiced people moving toward the norm since the injunctive norm use encourages to continue their behavior (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007).
Prejudice reduction interventions rarely use incentives. McKenzie-Mohr (2013) warns about introducing incentives for behaviors because once the incentive is taken away, motivation to continue engaging in the behavior decreases. When someone feels internally/intrinsically motivated to do a behavior, they do so because it makes them feel good, but when someone is externally/extrinsically motivated to do a behavior, they do so because of the incentive. McKenzie-Mohr (2013) explains that when incentives are introduced, someone’s intrinsic motivation is weakened and once the incentive is taken away all motivation is lost. This is probably a huge reason why incentives are not widely used in the realm of prejudice reduction because typically researchers are searching for an intervention that can have long-lasting effects.
One study conducted by Waytz, Young, and Ginges (2014) used financial incentives to significantly reduce bias in American Democrats and Republicans of attributing more hate than love to the opposing party’s motivations. Participants were told they could earn a bonus of 12 dollars for accurately reporting the opposing party’s love/hate motivations. However, this study did not follow up to see how these ideas may have been effected after the incentive is removed. Contradictory to this finding, a previous article demonstrated that the use of money as an incentive made participants less accurate in determining the emotions of others (Ma-Kellams and Blascovich, 2013). Due to the conflicting nature of the literature, it seems unpromising that the use of incentives could be helpful in prejudice reduction research.
Legault, Gutsell, and Inzlicht (2011) provide some input on how different motivation techniques affect prejudice reduction interventions. The first study divided the participants (white undergraduates in Canada) into three groups: autonomy anti-prejudice brochure which encouraged intrinsic motivation, societal control anti-prejudice brochure which encouraged extrinsic motivation, and control no brochure. The results found that the autonomy brochure helped reduce prejudice compared to the control condition, but the societal control brochure actually increased prejudice compared to the control condition (Legault et al., 2011). The second study also divided participants into three groups: priming of autonomy to reduce prejudice, priming of societal control to reduce prejudice, and no priming control. The results found similarly that the autonomy primed participants had lower explicit and implicit racial bias than the control condition, but the societal control primed participants had increased explicit and implicit racial bias (Legault et al., 2011). Legault et al.’s results connect to the results found by Devine, Plant, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, and Vance (2002) that high internally motivated/low externally motivated individuals show lower implicit race bias. These findings suggest that when using motivations as a way to reduce prejudice, intrinsic motivation is the best option and extrinsic motivation should be avoided. Therefore incentives may not be a good approach to prejudice reduction.
A meta-analysis completed by Cerasoli, Nicklin, and Ford (2014) on incentives and intrinsic motivation found some interesting results. When given incentives, the positive relationship between intrinsic motivation and task performance is strengthened by indirect performance-related incentives but the relationship is weakened by direct performance-related incentives (Cerasoli et al., 2014). In more simple terms, “intrinsic motivation was less important to performance when incentives were directly tied to performance and was more important when incentives were indirectly tied to performance” (Cerasoli et al., 2014). In order for extrinsic incentives to not dampen intrinsic motivation, the incentive has to not be directly related, but it is unclear how an indirect incentive condition could be applied in an experiment regarding prejudice reduction.
Social norms and incentives have been promising social marketing strategies in certain sustainability behaviors (McKenzie-Mohr 2013) but applying these strategies to prejudice reduction interventions is no easy task. Current successful interventions using those strategies are difficult to find. A literature review by Paluck and Green (2009) suggests that prejudice reduction needs much more research in order to find empirically supported interventions, and one main issue is that few programs implemented are based on research (Legault et al., 2011). In regards to social norms, both injunctive and descriptive norms should be used in prejudice reduction interventions (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007). The use of incentives should be handled cautiously. Direct extrinsic motivators should be avoided in order to not lose intrinsic motivation (Cerasoli et al., 2014). Research in prejudice reduction suggests that intrinsic motivation works better in reducing prejudice than extrinsic motivation (Legault et al., 2011) so this suggests that incentives may not be the best choice for future interventions since those are a part of extrinsic motivation. Future research for prejudice reduction interventions may want to focus on programs that encourage intrinsic motivation, possibly with the use of indirect incentives, and use descriptive and injunctive social norms as a means of education and encouragement.
References
Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M., & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 980.
De Tezanos-Pinto, P., Bratt, C., & Brown, R. (2010). What will the others think? In-group norms as a mediator of the effects of intergroup contact. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49, 507–523.
Devine, P. G., Plant, E. A., Amodio, D. M., Harmon-Jones, E., & Vance, S. L. (2002). The regulation of explicit and implicit race bias: the role of motivations to respond without prejudice. Journal of personality and social psychology, 82(5), 835.
Legault, L., Gutsell, J. N., & Inzlicht, M. (2011). Ironic effects of antiprejudice messages: How motivational interventions can reduce (but also increase) prejudice. Psychological Science, 22(12), 1472-1477. doi:10.1177/0956797611427918
Liebkind, K., Mähönen, T. A., Solares, E., Solheim, E., & Jasinskaja‐Lahti, I. (2014). Prejudice‐reduction in culturally mixed classrooms: The development and assessment of a theory‐driven intervention among majority and minority youth in Finland. Journal Of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 24(4), 325-339. doi:10.1002/casp.2168
Ma-Kellams C, Blascovich J (2013) The ironic effect of financial incentive on empathic accuracy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(1), 65–71.
McKenzie-Mohr, D. (2013). Fostering sustainable behavior: An introduction to community-based social marketing. New society publishers.
Medland, R. (2010). Curbing paper wastage using flavoured feedback. Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction, 224-227.
Paluck, E. L., & Green, D. P. (2009). Prejudice reduction: What works? A critical look at evidence from the field and the laboratory. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 339-367.
Pettigrew, T. F., Tropp, L. R. (2008). How does intergroup contact reduce prejudice? Meta-analytic tests of three mediators. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38(6), 922–934.
Schultz, P. W., Nolan, J. M., Cialdini, R. B., Goldstein, N. J., & Griskevicius, V. (2007). The constructive, destructive, and reconstructive power of social norms. Psychological science, 18(5), 429-434.
Waytz, A., Young, L. L., & Ginges, J. (2014). Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict. PNAS Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America, 111(44), 15687-15692. doi:10.1073/pnas.1414146111
Wright, S. C., Aron, A., McLaughlin-Volpe, T., Ropp, S. A. (1997). The extended contact effect: Knowledge of cross-group friendships and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(1), 73–90.