Distributions Matter : Measuring the Tightness and Looseness of Social Norms

Social norms are ubiquitous and are context specific. Understanding what shape they take is a crucial element of successful behavior change interventions. While existing methods focus on measuring norms in the form of what the average or most frequent behavior / opinion is in a given reference network, the complementary method introduced here offers the ability to measure the distribution of norm-related beliefs at the individual level. Different from the established norm elicitation methods, this approach captures intuitively the tightness and looseness of norms, which is particularly useful when the means or modal outcomes may conceal the underlying variation in an individual's norm-related beliefs