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McKenzie-Mohr (2013) explains that in the realm of increasing sustainability behaviors,
marketing strategies need to encourage an increase in desirable behaviors while also making sure
that there is an encouragement to decrease undesirable behaviors. Using social norms and
incentives have both been successful in fostering sustainable behaviors, but the question remains
whether these types of strategies can also be applied to other areas. Prejudice reduction is an
important social movement in need of developing research-supported interventions (Paluck &
Green, 2009) that can help people change their prejudiced attitudes and behaviors.
Social norms can be subdivided into two types: injunctive and descriptive. Injunctive
social norms specify information regarding which behaviors are acceptable or unacceptable but
descriptive social norms give information about which behaviors the majority of people carry out
(McKenzie-Mohr, 2013). So, injunctive norms describe which behaviors are right or wrong
while descriptive norms describe what other people tend to do. An example of an injunctive
social norm could be a flyer containing information about what kinds of materials get recycled
and encouraging people to comply. An example of a descriptive social norm could be the
perception that most people recycle if a flyer states that fact in an attempt to encourage people to
recycle. Both types of social norms can influence behaviors depending on how the information
given is perceived, however in the realm of sustainability injunctive norms appear to have less of
an impact unless paired with descriptive norms and the descriptive norm must encourage the
desirable behavior (McKenzie-Mohr, 2013).
Incentives can also be used to change motivations to take part in certain behaviors.
Incentives are a type of external motivator like rewards for doing the right behavior.
Disincentives are another way to change behaviors but rather instead of encouraging good
behaviors, disincentives discourage bad behaviors (McKenzie-Mohr, 2013). An example of
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using incentives could be receiving money for bringing re-useable bags to be used at the store.
On the other hand a disincentive could be being charged for each plastic bag used at the store.
Both of those examples would encourage people to use re-useable bags (McKenzie-Mohr, 2013).
Using social norms as a means for prejudice reduction is difficult to find in the literature.
Some interventions focus on educating participants using injunctive social norms. Pettigrew and
Tropp (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of the mediators between intergroup contact and
prejudice reduction. The meta-analysis found that “contact reduces prejudice by enhancing
knowledge about the outgroup, reducing anxiety about intergroup contact and increasing
empathy and perspective taking” (Pettigrew &Tropp, 2008, p. 922). De Tezanos-Pinto, Bratt, and
Brown (2010) demonstrated that attitudes toward minority out-groups changed when other
members of the majority in-group had intergroup contact. In other words indirect intergroup
contact, having friends or classmates who were part of intergroup contact, helped change
perceptions of norms and anxieties. Having individual level direct intergroup contact only
reduced anxieties, but did not change norm perceptions (De Tezanos-Pinto et al., 2010). This
finding supports the extended contact hypothesis that knowledge of an in-group and out-group
member having a close relationship lowers prejudice (Wright, McLaughlin-Volpe, & Ropp,
1997). These studies suggest that possible interventions encouraging intergroup contact could
help with prejudice reduction.
Liebkind, Mähönen, Solares, Solheim, and Jasinskaja‐Lahti (2014) conducted a prejudice
reduction study in culturally-mixed classes in Finland. Participants were from six secondary
schools with ages ranging from 13 to 19 years old. The intervention session given to the
experimental group included a presentation on different cultures, prejudice and attitudes. Then
there was a group discussion on intergroup friendships, and first-person stories about intergroup
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friendships written by researchers were read to the group. Lastly there was an active learning
session in which participants could share their own stories (Liebkind et al., 2014). The
intervention overall was a wide attempt to demonstrate the right behaviors through injunctive
social norms. The effects of the intervention were minimal. Participants of both majority and
minority groups showed an increase in perceived importance of intergroup contact and this effect
was seen most strongly among girls and younger participants (Liebkind et al., 2014). Liebkind et
al. (2014) expressed concerns about intermingling of control and experimental groups during
class subject changes. Overall, this intervention was not highly successful.
One possible direction to take prejudice reduction could be an intervention that gives
personalized feedback and suggestions. Medland (2010) describes an intervention to encourage
more sustainable behavior regarding paper waste in the workplace. This intervention gives
consumption feedback, pro-environmental behavior encouragement feedback, and injunctive and
descriptive norm feedback with the idea that each person has different attitudes and behaviors
(Medland 2010). In relation to prejudice reduction, an intervention could include giving
participants a preliminary test to assess prejudiced behaviors and attitudes. Based off of those
results, feedback to each person will contain information regarding the extent to which they are
prejudiced or non-prejudiced. Also, there could be encouraging tips on how to behave nonprejudiced in the future. In addition, social norm feedback would be given by descriptive
feedback information demonstrating whether they are outside the norm and behave very
prejudiced or behave very non-prejudiced along with injunctive feedback that disapproves or
praises these behaviors. The usage of both descriptive and injunctive norms is helpful in
avoiding the boomerang effect of non-prejudiced people moving toward the norm since the
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injunctive norm use encourages to continue their behavior (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein,
& Griskevicius, 2007).
Prejudice reduction interventions rarely use incentives. McKenzie-Mohr (2013) warns
about introducing incentives for behaviors because once the incentive is taken away, motivation
to continue engaging in the behavior decreases. When someone feels internally/intrinsically
motivated to do a behavior, they do so because it makes them feel good, but when someone is
externally/extrinsically motivated to do a behavior, they do so because of the incentive.
McKenzie-Mohr (2013) explains that when incentives are introduced, someone’s intrinsic
motivation is weakened and once the incentive is taken away all motivation is lost. This is
probably a huge reason why incentives are not widely used in the realm of prejudice reduction
because typically researchers are searching for an intervention that can have long-lasting effects.
One study conducted by Waytz, Young, and Ginges (2014) used financial incentives to
significantly reduce bias in American Democrats and Republicans of attributing more hate than
love to the opposing party’s motivations. Participants were told they could earn a bonus of 12
dollars for accurately reporting the opposing party’s love/hate motivations. However, this study
did not follow up to see how these ideas may have been effected after the incentive is removed.
Contradictory to this finding, a previous article demonstrated that the use of money as an
incentive made participants less accurate in determining the emotions of others (Ma-Kellams and
Blascovich, 2013). Due to the conflicting nature of the literature, it seems unpromising that the
use of incentives could be helpful in prejudice reduction research.
Legault, Gutsell, and Inzlicht (2011) provide some input on how different motivation
techniques affect prejudice reduction interventions. The first study divided the participants
(white undergraduates in Canada) into three groups: autonomy anti-prejudice brochure which
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encouraged intrinsic motivation, societal control anti-prejudice brochure which encouraged
extrinsic motivation, and control no brochure. The results found that the autonomy brochure
helped reduce prejudice compared to the control condition, but the societal control brochure
actually increased prejudice compared to the control condition (Legault et al., 2011). The second
study also divided participants into three groups: priming of autonomy to reduce prejudice,
priming of societal control to reduce prejudice, and no priming control. The results found
similarly that the autonomy primed participants had lower explicit and implicit racial bias than
the control condition, but the societal control primed participants had increased explicit and
implicit racial bias (Legault et al., 2011). Legault et al.’s results connect to the results found by
Devine, Plant, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, and Vance (2002) that high internally motivated/low
externally motivated individuals show lower implicit race bias. These findings suggest that when
using motivations as a way to reduce prejudice, intrinsic motivation is the best option and
extrinsic motivation should be avoided. Therefore incentives may not be a good approach to
prejudice reduction.
A meta-analysis completed by Cerasoli, Nicklin, and Ford (2014) on incentives and
intrinsic motivation found some interesting results. When given incentives, the positive
relationship between intrinsic motivation and task performance is strengthened by indirect
performance-related incentives but the relationship is weakened by direct performance-related
incentives (Cerasoli et al., 2014). In more simple terms, “intrinsic motivation was less important
to performance when incentives were directly tied to performance and was more important when
incentives were indirectly tied to performance” (Cerasoli et al., 2014). In order for extrinsic
incentives to not dampen intrinsic motivation, the incentive has to not be directly related, but it is
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unclear how an indirect incentive condition could be applied in an experiment regarding
prejudice reduction.
Social norms and incentives have been promising social marketing strategies in certain
sustainability behaviors (McKenzie-Mohr 2013) but applying these strategies to prejudice
reduction interventions is no easy task. Current successful interventions using those strategies are
difficult to find. A literature review by Paluck and Green (2009) suggests that prejudice
reduction needs much more research in order to find empirically supported interventions, and
one main issue is that few programs implemented are based on research (Legault et al., 2011). In
regards to social norms, both injunctive and descriptive norms should be used in prejudice
reduction interventions (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007). The use of
incentives should be handled cautiously. Direct extrinsic motivators should be avoided in order
to not lose intrinsic motivation (Cerasoli et al., 2014). Research in prejudice reduction suggests
that intrinsic motivation works better in reducing prejudice than extrinsic motivation (Legault et
al., 2011) so this suggests that incentives may not be the best choice for future interventions
since those are a part of extrinsic motivation. Future research for prejudice reduction
interventions may want to focus on programs that encourage intrinsic motivation, possibly with
the use of indirect incentives, and use descriptive and injunctive social norms as a means of
education and encouragement.
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References
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