Law and norms in collective action: maximizing social influence to minimize carbon emissions.

• Author: Ela, Jed S.

ABSTRACT

Legal scholars have long argued that informal social norms can solve collective action problems, as long as these problems occur in close-knit groups. This "group knittedness hypothesis" may suggest that social norms, by themselves, will not be able to solve the world's largest collective action problem: anthropogenic climate change. Yet recent scholarship has taken the group knittedness hypothesis too far, suggesting that any attempt to manage social influences in large, loose-knit groups is likely to be relatively ineffective.

In fact, social norms can shape individual behavior even in loose-knit groups, and climate policies that ignore norms may miss important opportunities to reduce carbon emissions. To predict how social norms might aid specific policy interventions, this Comment proposes looking at the visibility of specific behaviors rather than the knittedness of groups. According to two leading theories of the origin of social norms, norms govern the behaviors that people use to compete for social status or economic benefits. Because behaviors must be visible to become vehicles for competition, policymakers may be able to leverage norms by tailoring interventions to the visibility of carbon-emitting behaviors. For highly visible behaviors, where social influences are likely to be strong, policymakers should focus on creating a normative consensus in favor of changing behavior in order to align social influences with the desired policy. In contrast, for lower-visibility behaviors, policymakers must first focus on raising visibility, since visibility is necessary for social enforcement to begin. Finally, for inherently low-visibility behaviors, policymakers must design interventions to work entirely without social enforcement--or simply direct interventions toward other, more visible behaviors.

1. INTRODUCTION II. LEGAL THEORIES OF NORMS A. Definitions: Varieties of "Norms" 1. Social Norms Versus Personal Norms 2. Positive Norms Versus Normative Norms 3. Social Norms Versus Social Influences B. Reasons for Optimism? Cascade and Collective Action Models 1. Cascade Models: Social Change on the Cheap a. Dynamic Effects of Norms Models b. Sparking Cascades Through Interventions 2. Collective Action Models: Preserving the Commons a. Game Theory and Behavioral Experiments b. Empirical Studies: The Group Knittedness Hypothesis C. Persistent Pessimism: Individual Environmental Behavior III. SOCIAL INFLUENCE AND BEHAVIORAL VISIBILITY A. The Ubiquity of Social Influences 1. Theoretical Origins of Social Norms a. The Esteem Theory b. The Signaling Theory 2. Norms and Structure in Large-Scale Collective Action Problems B. Using Behavioral Visibility to Maximize Social Influence IV. APPLICATIONS A. Higher-Visibility Behaviors: Using Consensus to Stimulate Positive Social Influence 1. Public Information Campaigns 2. Anti-Idling Laws 3. On-the-Job Training 4. Technology Mandates and Incentives B. Lower-Visibility Behaviors: Raising Visibility to Enable Social Influence 1. Raising Visibility of Home Energy Use: Interventions Targeted Directly at the Home a. Direct Visibility b. Indirect Visibility 2. Raising Visibility of Home Energy Use: Targeting Analogous Behavior in Public Locations a. Workplaces b. Public Accommodations C. Inherently Low-Visibility Behaviors 1. Designing Nonsocial Norms Interventions. 2. Substituting Higher-Visibility Behaviors V. CONCLUSION I.

INTRODUCTION

Law-and-norms theorists have long acknowledged the power of social influences to determine individual behavior, and some have championed efforts to manage social norms (1) in situations where enforcement difficulties, transaction costs or political realities render other regulatory techniques--such as laws or economic incentives--ineffective or politically unpalatable. (2) Such situations include many important environmental harms caused by individuals, (3) leading scholars to suggest that social influences have important roles in inducing people to recycle, (4) abstain from littering, (5) and clean up after their dogs. (6)

At the same time, law-and-norms theorists have also argued that the ability of social norms to solve collective action problems depends upon relatively immutable characteristics of the social groups in which such problems occur. (7) Although scholars disagree about exactly which characteristics are required for social norms to solve collective action problems, a number of leading candidates--including face-to-face contact, long-term or repeated interactions, and reciprocal power between members--have often been rolled into one composite characteristic, "knittedness." (8) While knittedness and size are theoretically independent, in practice, the largest groups are unlikely to be close-knit. (9) Thus, when it comes to social norms solving collective action problems, it seems that size matters: smaller groups are better, while the largest ones may be hopeless. (10)

These two trends in law-and-norms theory--optimism that social norms can manage important social problems caused by individual behavior, yet pessimism that social norms can solve the largest collective action problems--have come to a head in recent scholarship on the regulation of individual environmental behavior. (11) To date, this literature has come down firmly on the side of social-norms pessimism. Counseling caution (at best) over social-norms interventions, authors such as Ann Carlson and Michael Vandenbergh have argued that infrastructure projects, economic incentives, and campaigns aimed at changing personal beliefs are better suited than social norms management for regulating individual behavior in large collective action problems. (12)

This Comment argues that regulators of individual behavior cannot afford to ignore social influences simply because a large-scale, loose-knit collective action problem exists. Behavior may be socially enforced even between only two or three individuals. (13) And because large collective action problems can always be broken down into (14)--or analyzed in terms of (15)--smaller groups, social influences shape individual choices regardless of the overall size or knittedness of a collective action problem, and regardless of whether such local influences result in groupwide norms. It follows that, other things being equal, interventions that maximize social influences are likely to change behavior most efficiently. (16) Social enforcement of behavior cannot, by itself, solve an extraordinarily complex problem like climate change. But it should not be ignored, because even the incremental effects of social influence may be strong enough to determine the success or failure of other interventions.

Getting such programs right matters, especially in the environmental arena, because of the huge combined impacts of individual choices. In the United States, individuals directly control an estimated 30-40 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions (17)--a total equal to 8 percent of global emissions and greater than the emissions of Africa, Central America and South America combined. (18) To avoid the worst effects of climate change--such as increased disease, heat deaths, severe weather, and crop failures, and an intolerable risk of large, abrupt sea-level rise--leading policymakers and scientists currently believe that greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by 60-80 percent by the year 2050. (19) In the United States, policymakers have also begun to converge on a short-term goal of returning to 1990 emissions levels by 2020. (20) For the United States as a whole, reducing carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels (approximately 6045 million metric tons per year) to 1990 levels (5017.5 million tons per year) (21) over the twelve years from 2008-20 implies a yearly reduction of 85.6 million tons per year, or a five-year reduction of 428 million tons per year. Given the portion of total emissions controlled by individuals, a series of moderate, low-cost changes in individual transportation and residential energy use could contribute much of the required near-term carbon dioxide emissions reductions. (22) And, in the longer term, these initial behavioral changes could lead to corresponding changes in people's attitudes, helping build support for more difficult or costlier measures--including everything from individual investments in energy efficiency, to denser urban settlement patterns, to economy-wide carbon tax or cap-and-trade proposals. (23)

Because so many different individual behaviors contribute to carbon dioxide emissions, (24) a logical approach to creating short-term aggregate reductions is a single national program targeting a number of separate, easily changed behaviors. (25) The ability to accurately predict social influences is especially important in designing such a multiple-behavior proposal, because predictions may affect both the optimal combination of behaviors to target and the design of interventions for each behavior. Thus, before such a proposal can be implemented, regulators need a finer-grained framework for evaluating social influences than is offered by existing literature on social norms and collective action.

This Comment proposes one such framework: behavioral visibility. Social influences, by definition, require knowledge of other people's behavior. All else being equal, the most visible behaviors will therefore be those most affected by social influences. (26) Applied consistently to both the selection of behaviors and design of interventions, this simple principle can greatly improve the effectiveness of a program targeting multiple emissions behaviors. Specifically, social influences are already likely to be strong for high-visibility behaviors (such as switching to a higher-mileage vehicle). For such behaviors, interventions should concentrate on ensuring that social forces aid rather than impede behavior change, by creating and publicizing a normative consensus in favor of...