| Chapter 1: | Social Conformity: The Collective Dimension |
|
|
The potential benefits of understanding conformity go well beyond the deterrence of crime and drinking. Valerie Curtis, a public health expert, writes in New Scientist that millions of deaths from AIDS, smoking, malaria, and diarrhea are caused each year by unhealthy behavior practices.31 If people were indeed rational decision makers, they would adopt behaviors known to reduce their chances of illness and death from these causes. But public health promotions that have relied on the belief that people will do what is best for themselves have been largely ineffective. Curtis proposes two alternative solutions to the problem of changing people’s behavior: make them feel disgust with unhealthy behavior or promote social norms for healthy behaviors that people would increasingly conform to. The risk in promoting certain norms is that it might lead to stereotypes and prejudice against people with unhealthy lifestyles.
Families are another battleground for social norms. Conformity has much influence on whether people marry, and at what ages, and on how many children they have. Over the last few decades, social norms about out-of-wedlock births have changed dramatically, and with it, the number of children growing up poor in single parent, female-headed families. Even the question of what marriage is has become a debate among advocates of different social norms. Although decisions about marriage and family are intensely personal, they often are the subject of policies designed to change them. But how can government policies modify these individual choices when they are not in the best interest of society? Many American states, for instance, have experimented with welfare policies to reduce out—of—wedlock births. In developing countries, birth rates are too high; in Western Europe and Japan, too low. Appeals to rational decision making are not likely to affect such choices, and it is questionable how effective financial incentives or tax breaks are in changing people’s behavior. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, American welfare polices have had only modest effects on changes in family structure over the past several decades.32
I do not contend that rationality is a faulty model of human behavior. Obviously people can make rational decisions.