The Promise and the Peril of Using Social Influence to Reverse Harmful Traditions
For a policy maker promoting the end of a harmful tradition, conformist social influence is a compelling mechanism. If an intervention convinces enough people to abandon the tradition, this can spill over and induce others to follow. A key objective is thus to activate spillovers and amplify an intervention’s effects. With female genital cutting as a motivating example, we develop empirically informed analytical and simulation models to examine this idea. Even if conformity pervades decision making, spillovers can range from irrelevant to indispensable. Our analysis highlights three considerations. First, ordinary forms of individual heterogeneity can severely limit spillovers, and understanding the heterogeneity in a population is essential. Second, although interventions often target biased samples of the population, targeting a representative sample is a more robust approach to spillovers. Finally, if the harmful tradition contributes to group identity, spillovers can hinge critically on disrupting the link between identity and tradition.
Date:
6 November 2019, 17:00 (Wednesday, 4th week, Michaelmas 2019)
Venue:
Nuffield College, New Road OX1 1NF
Venue Details:
Butler Room
Speaker:
Sonja Vogt (University of Bern)
Organising department:
Nuffield College
Organisers:
Ridhi Kashyap (University of Oxford),
Prof. Melinda Mills (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
Nuffield College Sociology Seminars
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editors:
Maxine Collett,
Catherine Farfan de los Godos
