Leveraging the Power of Narratives to Change Complex Behaviours

On 20 August 2020, the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC) hosted a webinar titled “Leveraging the Power of Narratives to Change Complex Behaviours”. This was the third webinar hosted by the Centre as part of its #BehaviorallySpeaking series which aims to tackle pertinent questions in the field of behavioral science and its impact on knowledge, attitudes and practices, globally and nationally.

The webinar delved into the importance of Educational Entertainment (EE), or “edutainment”, as a crucial tool for social and behaviour change, foregrounding its theories, and highlighting its history, variety, scientific study, impact and policy implications. Each of the five panelists, with vastly different engagement with the field, spoke to the topic from their experiences. This allowed the audience to engage with edutainment from multiple lenses, understanding it, at once, as a thoroughly scientific intervention, a deeply human experience, a simple medium of communication and an opportunity for nations to address pressing development problems.

Beyond the engaging speaker presentations, the audience participation through critical observations, commentary and questions, added immense value to the discussion.

Behaviour Change Post Lockdown: Staying ahead of the COVID-19 curve

The Centre for Social and Behaviour Change in collaboration with Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Project Sanchar hosted the webinar “Behaviour Change Post Lockdown: Staying ahead of the COVID-19 curve” on 21 May 2020 to an extremely positive response by the community.

The discussion highlighted the role of behavioural strategies to support adherence to necessary protective behaviours against COVID-19 – especially at a time when lockdowns are ending across the world and the responsibility for disease prevention shifts from the state to individuals. Our panelists applied the lenses of their own experience and research to discuss strategies from perspectives of public health, psychology and behavioural science.

We would like to thank our lively audience for adding value through the numerous pertinent questions that were answered by the panel. We would also like to share some notable insights that emerged from this webinar for your reference:

• Dr. K. Viswanath of Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health explained how individual response to COVID-19 prevention is a balance of risk perception and competing priorities. He urged strategists to consider how the social class system and digital divide can hold people back from practicing healthy behaviours – reiterating that we need people to be a part of the solutions through a process of co-design.
• CSBC Director, Dr. Pavan Mamidi described the key levers that are used to encourage behaviours: force of law, incentives, choice architecture and, most relevant for the current scenario, social norms. He described how people attach value to norms and how implicit ‘social costs’ or explicit enforcement in the form of reminders and cues can promote positive community behaviours to curb the spread of COVID-19.
• Dr. Sanna Balsari-Palsule highlighted the need to understand psychographic variation within the population when developing behaviour strategies. She discussed how differences in personality and mental health can affect the practice of behaviours such as social distancing, and accounting for such differences can help us achieve better compliance as a society.
• Elizabeth Serlemitsos of Breakthrough ACTION, The Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs compared the coronavirus pandemic with her past experiences in addressing HIV and Ebola epidemics – most important difference being that today we rely on individuals to practice behaviours that might benefit others. She also highlighted the urgent need to continue delivery for other health services (such as immunisation, treatment for malaria etc.) which if not provided, can cause the loss of more lives than the mortality of COVID-19 itself.

COVID-19 and Infodemic: Nudging people to become mindful consumers of information during a Pandemic

In our first session, our panelists discussed how the global phenomena of fake news, misinformation and disinformation have heightened in a time of uncertainty, leading to individual actions that are less than rational. The collective impact of these individual actions on public health and safety was also explored. Our panel of wide-ranging experts also shared their insights and strategies for the current crisis.

UPBIU-YCCI Webinar: BeSci in Action

The webinar's objective was to understand the behaviourally informed approaches that could help increase adherence to the IFA supplementation with a special focus on the CBG (Choices-Beliefs-Goals) Framework.

The webinar was well-received by the audience that included senior officials of the UP Technical Support Unit, CSBC experts, directors and managers, and participants of several CSBC courses and NITI Aayog fellowships.

Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation

A great deal of ink has been spilled on the subject of motivating and influencing others, but what happens when the person you most want to influence is you? Setting and achieving goals for yourself — at work, at home, and in relationships — is harder than it seems. With fascinating research from the field of motivation science and compelling stories of people who learned to motivate themselves, Get It Done by Dr Ayelet Fishbach illuminates invaluable strategies for pulling yourself in whatever direction you want to go — so you can achieve your goals while staying healthy, clear headed, and happy.

Migration and the Welfare State

Dr Tim Müller, a quantitative social scientist and Junior Research Group Leader (Assistant Professor) of the projects "Migration and the Welfare State" and "Determinants of resilience towards radicalization in adolescence” was the keynote speaker at this webinar. Dr Pavan Mamidi, Director at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change, gave the welcome address. Key insights from Dr Müller and his colleagues’ work on migration and welfare states include:

• Development of migration models that allow estimation of scale and composition of migration flows: Important variables that determine migration flows include the GDP of the destination country and population of the destination country. Further, flows are more likely between countries with similar spending, indicating a status maintenance motive.
• Examining the performance of different migration-, integration- and welfare-state regimes and their effects on integration outcomes: Two causal pathways predict migrant disadvantage (1) Restrictive immigration policy and high employment protection; (2) Restrictive immigration policy and a developed welfare state.
• Development of fiscal models that allow the assessment of the current and future fiscal balance of migration: It was found that immigrants in Germany take up fewer benefits (in terms of social assistance) than they are eligible for, which has implications for migrant disadvantage and poverty.
• Estimating the acceptance of immigration while taking into account immigrants as contributors to the welfare system and welfare recipients: It was found that the higher the percentage of migration-related news articles is, the more negative the attitudes are about migration. However, this effect is lower than the effects of income, political leanings, and gender, among others, on attitudes about migration.

The session also included a discussion on the factors that bolster narratives against migration, including media effects and political motivation, and policies that support migrant workers.

Launch Event

Given the recent growth of the number of researchers and practitioners working in the field of social and behavior change, it is a critical moment to make the latest knowledge and evidence on social norms widely accessible and provide opportunities for practitioners and researchers from different disciplines and sectors to share and produce knowledge. Social norms expertise currently rests in a small group of global “experts,” which is inadequate to meet the demand for assistance to guide social norms practice and research. This learning network will support effective programming that addresses the norms that influence critical health and development issues by strengthening social norms expertise at the implementation level, where it matters most.

The webinar is the launch event of the South Asia Learning Collaborative, officially inviting participation from interested organizations and people working or wanting to work with social norms in South Asia.

Assessing Social Norms to Inform Programme Design and Implementation Strategies

Given the recent growth of the number of researchers and practitioners working in the field of social and behaviour change, it is a critical moment to make the latest knowledge and evidence on social norms widely accessible and provide opportunities for practitioners and researchers from different disciplines and sectors to share and produce knowledge.

This workshop built on the SA-SNLC's promise to improve practice towards the use of social norms. Our facilitators guided participants through the assessment of social norms to inform programme design and implementation strategies through two sessions spread out over two days.

The takeaways from the workshop were:

• Existing formative assessment approaches may overlook norms. If shifting norms is important to your program, completing a norms assessment is a must.
• It’s important to understand how norms influence program behaviours.
• Norms assessments answer, for a given context: what the relevant norms are, who the reference groups are, why people comply with norms, and which norms are the most important.

Women’s Collectives as Norm Change Agents

There has been a rise in women’s collective action in South Asia. The focus of these programmes is uplifting women’s social and economic status, and they have presented an opportunity to foster women’s groups for collective action. A gamut of evidence from this region shows how such grassroots platforms of women have pushed boundaries to shift regressive social norms. However, there is not enough discussion on the nuanced role of women’s collectives in altering social norms. While many of these programmes do not intend norm shifts, they do change norms while working towards their objectives. The theory of change of such interventions or programmes, once drawn, can be adopted by policymakers and implementers to ensure large scale impact.

The session focused on the role of the collectives as agents of social and gender norm change. While such collectives often do not pursue norm change as an outcome, their activities result in normative change by challenging patriarchal regimes. Through this session, the SA-SNLC brought together a panel of key stakeholders to discuss the role of women’s collectives in catalysing norm change.

The takeaways from the workshop were:

• Existing formative assessment approaches may overlook norms. If shifting norms is important to your program, completing a norms assessment is a must.
• It’s important to understand how norms influence program behaviours.
• Norms assessments answer, for a given context: what the relevant norms are, who the reference groups are, why people comply with norms, and which norms are the most important.

Harnessing the SA-SNLC community’s wisdom: Norm-shifting initiatives from South Asia

To mark a year since the launch of the South Asia Social Norms Learning Collaborative, this webinar was an interactive session that leveraged the knowledge within the community.

Norm-shifting programmes or programmes that have significant norm-shifting components are few and far between in South Asia. This session will brought together academics and practitioners from reputed organisations in the region to discuss their work on norm-shifting and share their learnings.

From Theory to Practice

This webinar addressed the issues of moving from theory to practice in social norms programming. Our panellists, experts in norm change programming in the areas of nutrition, gender, and health, shared their knowledge of how best to navigate these challenges with examples from successful on-ground interventions. They used case studies of their research, highlighting the underlying theoretical frameworks, ToCs, their interventions, and results, to demonstrate best practices associated with social norms programming. Awareness of the same will help increase the effectiveness of interventions addressing social norms in the field.

Connecting the Dots: Behavioural Science & Norm Change

The dynamics between societal and individual expectations, beliefs and preferences play an elemental role in shaping behaviour. There are several cognitive and behavioural biases that hinder people’s motivation, ability or even opportunities to perform various actions. Social norms can be leveraged within such behaviour change interventions to positively influence and create impact! The study of social norms intersects with behaviour science at many points: norms signal appropriate behaviour and set behavioural expectations or rules within a group of people. They are also key to many behaviour change interventions, especially when the goal is en masse, sustained behaviour change. Using a 360-degree behaviour change approach with a combination of communication and non-communication interventions can have the desired results.

In this webinar, hosted by the South Asia Social Norms Learning Collaborative (SA-SNLC), the panellists discussed the ways in which social norms influence and regulate behaviour, and shared insights that can be drawn from behavioural science on the subject of norm change.

Workshop: Shifting Social Norms as Part of Social and Behaviour Change

This workshop built on the SA-SNLC’s promise to build capacity among local implementers as well as researchers who are new to the field of social norms programming. Through two sessions spread out over two days, our facilitators imparted crucial foundational knowledge on social norms to participants. The highly interactive session format allowed in-depth exploration of and discussion on the fundamentals of social norms and provided budding researchers with key insights on implementation and budding implementers with a basic theoretical grounding of their work.

The takeaways from the workshop were:

• Defining social norms and distinguishing them from attitudes/beliefs and behaviours.
• Identifying the importance of normative influence between and within different layers of the socio-ecological framework for health and well-being.
• Explaining, in practical terms, how social norms influence health and other behaviours.

Measuring Normative Shifts in Complex Environments

This workshop built on the SA-SNLC's promise to improve practice towards use of social norms. Our facilitators guided participants through the measurement of social norms. The highly interactive session format allowed in-depth exploration of design, implementation, and evaluation challenges and solutions for community-based social and behaviour change (SBC) projects engaging in, expanding, or planning to expand normative change efforts.

The takeaways from the workshop were:

• Practitioners should use an approach best suited to respondents (i.e., single item, scales or indices, vignettes, other participatory methods).
• Social change is complex; monitoring and evaluation methods need to address complexity.
• Data should be collected and used in real time to guide implementation

Theory, Practice, Sustainability: Understanding Multiple Perspectives on Norm-Change

The role of social norms in influencing and shaping human behaviour is beyond debate. Behaviour change practitioners and policymakers recognise that to influence behaviours, it is important to understand how social norms work and to understand how they interact with numerous other influencers or drivers of behaviour situated in complex ecosystems. This is especially true in collective multicultural societies like those found in South Asia, where religion, caste, class, ethnicity, tribalism, and regionalism influence group norms in different ways.

It is equally important to recognise that norms researchers need to be empathetic to the people and cultures being researched so that the right behaviours and the right drivers are captured, more so when we realise that norms that are often resistant to change. Last, the role of donor organisations cannot be underscored in ensuring the smooth running of research studies or intervention programmes. Thus, this event was an honest and introspective discussion between researchers, practitioners, and donors, one that is vital for sustainable and conscientious norm shifts going forward.