Victim-Blaming Norms: Correcting Misperceptions or Morality Drive Social Change?

• In Event: Experiments on Social Norms and Identity

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) entails huge socioeconomic and psychological costs, yet policy and behavior that combat it respond sluggishly. Are prevailing victim-blaming social norms responsible? What can change them to enact policy, and behavior change? We address these with a survey experiment on a representative sample of Turkish population (N = 4,000). We incentivize both the elicitation of social norms and subjects’ behavior. Leveraging a within-subject design, we provide information correcting any (mis)perceptions about victim-blaming norms. We find that attitudes and policy/behavior are influenced by different channels, respectively. While correcting misperceptions about norms (through information) causes a positive change in attitudes, it does not cause policy or behavior change. The former simply reflects conformity: initial perceptions about social norms were too “pessimistic”. In contrast, the process of eliciting higher-order beliefs about others’ views (norm) --absent any information provision-- forces subjects to engage in relative moral evaluations and causes a sizable policy and behavior response. The latter is driven by subjects who perceive themselves to be more virtuous (less victim-blaming) than average and donate to IPV prevention. Thus, moral comparisons triggered by introspection, raise the salience of norms generating `soft learning' that causes policy and behavior change. The policy implication is that, while changing societal attitudes is a long-run process, welfare-improving policy change is possible in the short-run even without changing peoples' values, through a stepping stone approach to social change.

Authors

• Sevinc Bermek, King's College London

• Asli Unan, University of Amsterdam