How Change Happens

by Cass R Sunstein

  Once norms change, some inchoate belief or value might be activated that was formerly suppressed or that was like that small voice in the head. It is fair enough to speak of liberation, but the case is not as simple as that of the law student at Columbia, who was entirely clear about what she thought. Partially adaptive preferences should be familiar. The task of norm entrepreneurs is to try to bring them out of the closet.

  Discriminators

  Thus far my focus has been on objects of discrimination. But as the case of the young men in Saudi Arabia suggests, discriminators are also affected by social norms. With respect to those who discriminate on the basis of sex and race (or other characteristics), we can imagine four kinds of cases:

  1. Those in which discriminators want to discriminate, and norms allow them to do so

  2. Those in which discriminators want to discriminate, but norms discourage or forbid them from doing so

  3. Those in which discriminators do not want to discriminate, and norms allow them not to do so

  4. Those in which discriminators do not want to discriminate, but norms encourage or require them to do so

  In cases 1 and 3, there is no conflict between preferences and norms. Case 2 is the familiar one; norms are operating as leashes or constraints. Note that in such cases, discrimination will not be observed, at least if the relevant norms are effective. Discriminators will falsify their preferences, or at least not reveal them. They will act as if they do not want to discriminate, even though they do. At the same time, they might hope to change the norm, at least in their community, and the question is whether they can succeed. To do so, they might well have to act collectively. Their efforts are far more likely to succeed if they are highly publicized. (To be sure, some discriminators will simply defy the norm.)

  Case 4 may be the most interesting one. Here too, many discriminators will falsify their preferences. As in the case of Saudi Arabian men, they will act as if they are sexist, even though they are not. (In human history, that has often happened.) Faced with the stated conflict, what can discriminators do, short of defying the norm?

  Here as well, norm entrepreneurs can act to alter the norm. They can also ask for or enlist law. Consider a revealing fact: Some of the restaurants and hotels that that were regulated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually lobbied vigorously for the legislation.36 Why, you might ask, would such companies affirmatively seek to be forbidden by law from discriminating on the basis of race? If they did not want to discriminate on the basis of race, they certainly could have stopped doing so. Why did they need the law?

  Norms help to explain what happened. The relevant companies had an antecedent preference: they wanted to make money. The best way to make money was to serve anyone who was willing to pay. For that reason, they did not want to discriminate. In fact, they wanted not to discriminate, because discrimination was costly on their part. But in light of prevailing norms, they would incur a high cost for not discriminating, which would provoke a hostile reaction in their community. As Lawrence Lessig writes, “For a white to serve or hire blacks was for the white to mark him or herself as having either a special greed for money or a special affection for blacks.”37 In these circumstances, the force of the law was needed to alter the social meaning of nondiscrimination. Once the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, nondiscrimination was a matter of compliance. Profit-making companies were liberated.

  We can see related phenomena in other domains in which revised norms, or new laws, work to counteract discrimination. No one should doubt that many men who have engaged in sex discrimination did not want to do so, in the sense that they acted in accordance with norms that they did not endorse (and might have abhorred). As norm entrepreneurs began their work, norms started to change, and as law prohibited discriminatory behavior, such men could do what they wanted to do. Of course, this is far from a full picture of the consequence of new antidiscrimination norms. But it is part of it.

  The phenomenon holds more broadly. Many people are glad that the law requires them to buckle their seatbelts because it enables them to do as they wish, and buckle up, without seeming to accuse people of being risky drivers. Many people support laws that forbid drug use in part because such laws make it easier for them to decline to use drugs. Many people support drunk-driving laws, in part because it enables them to decline to drive when they should not. New norms and norm revisions, and laws that codify them, can operate as precommitment strategies. They can help people to do what they want; previous norms stopped them from doing so.

  Liberating Isms

  Some norms reduce discrimination, but others increase it. Suppose that people have antecedent hostility toward members of social groups; suppose that social norms constrain them from speaking or acting in ways that reflect that hostility. This is a good side of “political correctness”; it prevents people from expressing ugly impulses. But norms that constrain sexism and racism are of course stronger in some times and places than in others, and they can be relaxed or eliminated. In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, many people feared that something of this kind had happened (and as of this writing, are fearing that it continues to happen). The concern is that President Trump is a norm entrepreneur; he is shifting norms in such a way as to weaken or eliminate their constraining effects. It is difficult to test that proposition in a rigorous way, but let’s consider a highly suggestive experiment.

  Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago, Georgy Egorov of Northwestern University and Stefano Fiorin of the University of California at Los Angeles attempted to test whether Trump’s political success affected Americans’ willingness to support, in public, a xenophobic organization.38 Two weeks before the 2016 election, Bursztyn and his colleagues recruited 458 people from eight states that the website PredictWise said that Trump was certain to win (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Mississippi, West Virginia and Wyoming). Half the participants were told that Trump would win. The other half received no information about Trump’s projected victory.

  All participants were then asked an assortment of questions, including whether they would authorize the researchers to donate one dollar to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, accurately described as an anti-immigrant organization, the founder of which has written, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”39 If participants agreed to authorize the donation, they were told that they would be paid an additional one dollar. Half the participants were assured that their decision to authorize a donation would be anonymous. The other half were given no such assurance. On the contrary, they were told that members of the research team might contact them, thus suggesting that their willingness to authorize the donation could become public.

  For those who were not informed about Trump’s expected victory in their state, giving to the anti-immigration group was far more attractive when anonymity was assured: 54 percent authorized the donation under cover of secrecy as opposed to 34 percent when the authorization might become public. But for those who were informed that Trump would likely win, anonymity did not matter at all! When so informed, about half the participants were willing to authorize the donation regardless of whether they received a promise of anonymity. The central point is that information about Trump’s expected victory altered social norms, making many people far more willing to give publicly and eliminating the comparatively greater popularity of anonymous endorsements.

  As an additional test, Bursztyn and his colleagues repeated their experiment in the same states during the first week after Trump’s 2016 election. They found that Trump’s victory also eliminated the effects of anonymity: again, about half the participants authorized the donation regardless of whether the authorization would be public. The general conclusion is that if Trump had not come on the scene, many Americans would refuse to authorize a donation to an anti-immigrant organization unless they were promised anonymity.
But with Trump as president, people feel liberated. Anonymity no longer matters, apparently because Trump’s election has weakened the social norm against supporting anti-immigrant groups. It is now more acceptable to be known to agree “that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

  The central finding can be seen as the mirror image of the tale of the law student and the law professor. For a certain number of people, hostility to anti-immigrant groups is a private matter; they do not want to voice that hostility in public. But if norms are seen to be weakening or to be shifting, they will be willing to give voice to their beliefs. The case of the Saudi Arabian men is essentially the same.

  We can easily imagine much uglier versions of the central finding. When police brutality increases, when hateful comments or action are directed at members of certain religious groups, when white supremacy marches start, when ethnic violence breaks out, when mass atrocities occur, and when genocide is threatened, one reason is the weakening or transformation of social norms that once made the relevant actions unthinkable.40 In some such cases, what was akin to a tax has been eliminated; in other cases, what was akin to a tax has been transformed into something like a subsidy. The subsidy might be necessary to spur the destructive behavior, but for some participants, removal of the tax is enough.

  Internalized Norms

  My emphasis has been on situations in which people have an antecedent preference or value, whose expression a norm blocks; revision of the norm liberates them so that they can talk or act as they wish. Sexual desires may be the most obvious example, where people may be startled to find out what they like, though in that context, there can be a complex interplay between discovery and construction of preferences. (The 2017 Netflix television series Gypsy is a brilliant exploration of that topic.) For sexual desires, the weakening of norms can and does produce a kind of unleashing, as people feel free to acknowledge to others, and to express, preferences that had been hidden. Sometimes people do not even acknowledge those preferences to themselves, and it takes a comment, an image, or a partner to unleash them.

  But I have also noted that some norms are internalized, so that people do not feel chained at all. Once the norm is revised, they speak or act differently, either because they feel constrained by the new norm to do that, or because their preferences and values change. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a chilling tale of something like that, with its terrifying closing lines: “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”41

  That is the dark side. But let’s return to the case of sexual harassment. Many men are appalled by the very thought of sexual harassment. For them, norms and legal rules against sexual harassment are not a problem, any more than norms and legal rules against theft and assault are a problem. If they are older, some of these men might have experienced a shift over the course of their lives. If they are younger, some of these men might not be able to imagine a context in which sexually harassing someone would be a fun or good experience.

  For such men, we do not have cases of preference falsification. For some of them, it might be helpful and clarifying to speak of adaptive preferences. But it is better to say that the relevant people are deeply committed to the norm in principle, so that defying it would not merely be costly; it would be unthinkable.

  Something similar can be said for many actions that conform to social norms. Most people are not bothered by the social norm against dueling. For many people, seatbelt buckling and recycling are not properly characterized as costs; they are a matter of routine, and for those who buckle their seatbelts or recycle, the relevant actions may well feel like a benefit. When the social norm is one of considerateness, those who are considerate usually do not feel themselves to be shackled; they want to be considerate. When this is so, the situation will be stable. Norm entrepreneurs cannot point to widespread, but hidden, dissatisfaction with the norm. But for both insiders and outsiders, it will often be difficult to distinguish between situations in which norms are internalized and situations in which they merely seem to be. That is one reason that stunning surprises are inevitable.

  Notes

  1. See Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies (1998).

  2. For a broadly consistent account, see Catharine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1978). Of course it is true that some harassers were and are women, and some objects of harassment were and are men. For simplicity of exposition, and to capture what mostly has happened and does happen, I bracket this point.

  3. See Lawrence Lessig, The Regulation of Social Meaning, 62 U. Chi. L. Rev. 943 (1995).

  4. See Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 US 57 (1986); Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, 523 US 75 (1998).

  5. See Richard McAdams, The Expressive Powers of Law: Theories and Limits (2015), and in particular at 148: “When the perception of public attitudes falls seriously out of line with reality, legislators gain by enacting legislation corresponding to actual attitudes (and actual future votes), which produces a dramatic revelation—a ‘wake up call’—of actual attitudes.”

  6. See P. Wesley Schultz et al., The Constructive, Destructive, and Reconstructive Power of Social Norms, 18 Psych. Sci. 429 (2007).

  7. That point is not meant to deny that the objections to “political correctness” as a way of silencing dissenters are often quite right.

  8. Leonardo Bursztyn et al., Misperceived Social Norms: Female Labor Force Participation in Saudi Arabia (2018), http://www.nber.org/papers/w24736.

  9. Timur Kuran, Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution, 61 Public Choice 41 (1989).

  10. See id.; Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious (2011); Susanne Lohmann, The Dynamics of Social Cascades, 47 World Pol. 42 (1994). Note, however, that it would be possible to attempt to measure hidden preferences, beliefs, and values—for example, by guaranteeing anonymity. For an instructive finding that anonymity matters because of the role of social norms, see Leonardo Bursztyn et al., From Extreme to Mainstream: How Social Norms Unravel (2017), http://www.nber.org/papers/w23415, discussed below. For a demonstration that people are more willing to acknowledge discrimination online than on the phone, see Timur Kuran and Edward McCaffery, Expanding Discrimination Research: Beyond Ethnicity and to the Web, 85 Soc. Sci. Q. 713 (2004).Even if we obtain a sense of hidden preferences, we might not be able to predict change because of the importance of social dynamics, which cannot be anticipated in advance. See Susanne Lohmann, I Know You Know He or She Knows We Know You Know They Know: Common Knowledge and the Unpredictability of Informational Cascades, in Political Complexity: Nonlinear Models of Politics 137 (Diana Richards ed. 2000); see also the discussion below.

  11. Anna Collar, Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas (2013).

  12. Kuran, supra note 1.

  13. Merouan Mekouar, Protest and Mass Mobilization: Authoritarian Collapse and Political Change (2016).

  14. See Duncan Watts, The Non-Inevitability of Donald Trump (and Almost Everything) (2017), https://medium.com/@duncanjwatts/the-non-inevitability-of-donald-trump-and-almost-everything-2a78e764183f.

  15. Timur Kuran, Ethnic Norms and Their Transformation through Reputational Cascades, 27 J. Legal Stud. 623 (1998).

  16. See Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939 (2016). A highly controversial account is found in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1997); a counterpoint appears in Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (rev. ed. 2017).

  17. Martin Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 (1955/2017).

  18. Id. at 124.

  19. See Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Considerateness, 60 Iyyun 205 (2011).

  20. See Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921 (2005).

  21. See Collar, supra note 11.

  22. Jo
n Elster, Rationality, Emotions, and Social Norms, 98 Synthese 21, 23 (1994).

  23. I do not deal here with norms that solve collective action problems. For the defining account, see Edna Ullmann-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms (1977); see also Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Normal Rationality (2017). The analysis here could be adapted to that context, but with several wrinkles. The most important is that while such norms constrain people from doing as they wish (by preventing defection), they also operate to their mutual advantage, and so maintenance of the norm is in people’s interest. For that reason, the leash that such norms impose should be quite welcome, at least on reflection.

  24. The classic account is found in Mark Granovetter, Threshold Models of Collective Behavior, 83 Am. J. Soc. 1420 (1978); the idea is productively extended in Kuran, supra note 1.

  25. See Cass R. Sunstein, Social Roles and Social Norms, 96 Colum. L. Rev. 903 (1996); see Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild 163–207 (2016). Both discriminators and objects of discrimination can of course serve as norm entrepreneurs. In the context of sexual harassment, Taylor Swift served as a norm entrepreneur in 2017, with her highly publicized objection to an act of unwanted touching. See Melena Ryzik, Taylor Swift Spoke Up. Sexual Assault Survivors Were Listening, New York Times (August 15, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/arts/music/taylor-swift-sexual-assault.html?_r=0.