Center for Social Norms & Behavioral Dynamics
Education
We seek to educate partners about our social norms framework and how to understand the nature of collective behaviors. To that end, we supply and are affiliated with several educational initiatives that interested parties may explore...
Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences
The Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics is affiliated with Penn’s Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences (MBDS) Program, which is informed by contemporary theories and research methods of behavioral economics, decision sciences, network analysis and public policy. This degree program equips students with theoretical and practical tools to address a variety of real-life problems across domains.
Coursera
A joint Penn-UNICEF project, our two-part Coursera series on “Social Norms, Social Change” enables participants across the globe to learn about the basic ideas in our social norms framework. It teaches how to diagnose social norms and how to distinguish them from other social constructs, such as customs or conventions. These distinctions are crucial for effective policy interventions aimed to create new, beneficial norms or eliminate harmful ones. The course further has a specific focus on the development of diagnostic and measurement tools that can be applied in practice across corporate and nonprofit contexts.
Workshops
We also supply workshops geared towards building our partners’ capacities to measure, diagnose, and change social norms and other collective behaviors of interest. Throughout these workshops, we apply our social norms framework through examples and activities to various programmatic areas. These workshops provide the participants spaces for active engagement through hands-on learning activities, where they can collaboratively construct measures relevant to their area of expertise. Past trainings have included modules on a range of topics including (but not limited to): legal and social norms, scripts and schemata, understanding social networks and the relationship between legal and social change, sanitation among others.
The Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics will soon be launching a series of workshops that will be hosted over the summer, where our experts shall work with organizations that seek to understand how to measure collective behaviors, how they can be diagnosed, what the motivational factors supporting such behavior are, and how to enact large-scale behavioral change.
