Department of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2012 Dec;103(6):899-915. doi: 10.1037/a0030015. Epub 2012 Sep 17.
Persistent, widespread harassment in schools can be understood as a product of collective school norms that deem harassment, and behavior allowing harassment to escalate, as typical and even desirable. Thus, one approach to reducing harassment is to change students' perceptions of these collective norms. Theory suggests that the public behavior of highly connected and chronically salient actors in a group, called social referents, may provide influential cues for individuals' perception of collective norms. Using repeated, complete social network surveys of a public high school, we demonstrate that changing the public behavior of a randomly assigned subset of student social referents changes their peers' perceptions of school collective norms and their harassment behavior. Social referents exert their influence over peers' perceptions of collective norms through the mechanism of everyday social interaction, particularly interaction that is frequent and personally motivated, in contrast to interaction shaped by institutional channels like shared classes. These findings clarify the development of collective social norms: They depend on certain patterns of and motivations for social interactions within groups across time, and are not static but constantly reshaped and reproduced through these interactions. Understanding this process creates opportunities for changing collective norms and behavior.
学校中持续存在的、广泛的骚扰行为可以被理解为集体学校规范的产物，这些规范认为骚扰以及助长骚扰升级的行为是典型的，甚至是可取的。因此，减少骚扰的一种方法是改变学生对这些集体规范的看法。理论表明，一个群体中高度联系和长期突出的行为者（称为社会参照者）的公开行为可能为个人对集体规范的看法提供有影响力的线索。我们利用一所公立高中的重复、完整的社会网络调查，证明了随机指定的一组学生社会参照者的公开行为的改变会改变他们的同龄人对学校集体规范的看法以及他们的骚扰行为。社会参照者通过日常社会互动的机制对同龄人对集体规范的看法产生影响，特别是频繁的、个人动机驱动的互动，而不是像共享课程等机构渠道所塑造的互动。这些发现阐明了集体社会规范的发展：它们取决于群体内部随时间推移的特定的社会互动模式和动机，而不是静态的，而是通过这些互动不断重塑和再现。了解这一过程为改变集体规范和行为创造了机会。
