"How social norms change" is not only a theoretical question but also an empirical one. Many organizations have implemented programs to abandon harmful social norms. These programs are standardly monitored and evaluated with a set of empirical tools. While monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of changes in objective outcomes and behaviors is well-developed, we will argue that M&E of changes in the w...

Chairman Mao first initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to expel capitalist influences within the Party and solidify his position as the supreme leader of China. In his " 16 Points, " Mao called on the masses and youth of China to rise up and " strike at the handful of ultra-reactionary bourgeois Rightists and counter-revolutionary revisionists, and expose and cr...

Ofer H. Azar* Department of Economics Northwestern University June 2003 Abstract The paper presents a model of the evolution of social norms. When a norm is costly to follow and people do not derive benefits from following it except for avoiding social disapproval, the norm erodes over time. Tip percentages, however, increased over the years, suggesting that people derive benefits from tipping,...

This article elaborates on foundational issues in the social sciences and their impact on the contemporary theory of belief revision. Recent work in the foundations of economics has focused on the role external social norms play in choice. Amartya Sen has argued in [Sen93] that the traditional rationalizability approach used in the theory of rational choice has serious problems accommodating th...

Child care centers are a unique context for studying communication about the social and personal expectations about health behaviors. The theory of normative social behavior (TNSB; Rimal & Real, 2005 ) provides a framework for testing the role of social and psychological influences on handwashing behaviors among child care workers. A cross-sectional survey of child care workers in 21 centers in...

Indirect reciprocity, in which individuals help others with a good reputation but not those with a bad reputation, is a mechanism for cooperation in social dilemma situations when individuals do not repeatedly interact with the same partners. In a relatively large society where indirect reciprocity is relevant, individuals may not know each other's reputation even indirectly. Previous studies i...

In sociology, social philosophy, social ontology, and classical choice theory the notion of a social norm is usually introduced by using a rich normative, semantic, and social vocabulary, while the notions that evolutionary game theory proceeds from seem too poor to elucidate the idea of social norms. In this paper, I suggest to define a notion of social norms that is as basic as possible, in t...

Triangular norms, or t-norms for short, play an important role for the semantics of fuzzy logics. Although an enormous number of examples and a remarkable number of construction methods for this kind of operation has been established, a uniform approach is still outstanding. This paper is devoted to a specific algebraic-geometrical framework within which t-norms, up to isomorphism, can be descr...