Popular Delusions: How Social Conformity Molds Society and Polit ...

“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them…is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.”²⁶ People do things, they argue, because of incentives, or they avoid things because of disincentives. Incentives come in three types: financial, moral, and social. Moral incentives are the personal desire to do good or avoid evil. Social incentives are the approval or disapproval people get from others. But incentives are all of a kind, as if people accept payment in different currencies. One might, for example, use dollars or social disapproval interchangeably as incentives to alter someone’s behavior. They admit, however, that manipulation of incentives can lead to unexpected results, which is confirmed by research in social psychology. Substantial evidence shows that rewards and monetary incentives often fail to change behavior as expected and may produce the opposite effect from what is intended.²⁷ People may react to an attempt to change or manipulate their behavior by doing just the opposite. At best, rewards may produce a short-lived effect after which people return to their previous behavior. To change behavior, it is more effective to use people’s natural tendencies to act like one another through conformity, compliance, and empathy. These tools are more effective than incentives at producing long-term behavioral change.

Theories of human behavior are not scientific curiosities. Changing and correcting behavior are often important goals of government, and good public policy requires a sound theory about human behavior. The practical question of how one might use conformity to change behavior is drawing more attention from academics and government policy makers. It is now widely recognized that people’s conformity with social norms has a positive influence on lawful behavior beyond what any law or legal sanction might produce.²⁸ One application is that government might be able to induce some people to obey the law more consistently by increasing their awareness of social norms and improving their perception of how often other people do the right thing. This method has been tried, for example, to fight inner—city crime²⁹ and reduce binge drinking by college students.³⁰