Unraveling the “Social” in Social Norms: The Conditioning Effect of User Connectivity

Abundant empirical evidence supports the overall efficacy of social norms as a strategy to induce behavior change. However, very few studies examine how the effect of social norms is differentially manifest across individuals, especially in the contemporary socially connected digital world. We conjecture that the effects of social norms are conditional on an individual’s digital social ties and provide new empirical evidence from a randomized field experiment that included more than 7,000 individuals on an online physical activity community observed for a two-month period. In our investigation of the effect of social norms on users’ goal-setting and goal attainment behaviors, we find a significant moderating role for social connectivity: individuals with higher levels of social connectivity are more susceptible to a social norms message containing information indicating the number of users in this community who set a goal in the pretreatment month. Additional analysis reveals that individuals who have many followers (i.e., high in-degree) but do not follow many others (low out-degree) are the most susceptible to the social norms treatment. Strikingly, we find that social norms also lead to a substantially lower rate of goal attainment compared with the control message that simply highlights the benefits of setting a goal. This adverse effect is also heterogeneously experienced, conditional on the number of social ties. Our findings have important implications for the design of interventions based on social norms.