How to break bad social norms

May we all become "free thinkers"

Free thinkers are defined to be those who follow what they think to be true and are able to go against the prevailing norms to protect what they think. These people help drive change to happen when an adverse social norm is widely practiced.

Speaking of change, I made some notes of the report I read on social norms: how to break negative social norms and build positive ones.

KAP - Knowledge - Attitude - Practice

Knowledge and attitude can go hand in hand. When people have more knowledge of an issue, they are likely to change their attitude towards it. The relation between knowledge and attitude are positive but that between attitude and practice can be different. People can understand the problem, they know the solution but they still fail to practise or take action to change it. For example, a mother who doesn't want to have her daughter go through FGM (Female genital mutation/cutting) knows that it's bad for her daughter but she still makes her daughter be cut because of social norms. To be specific, if she doesn't do so, other families can confront her and seclude her family in the community.

Beware of pluralistic ignorance!

When a large number of people are aware of the negative nature of an issue, they understand the consequences but they still do it. The reason for this is that they think other people still support the bad practice and if they do not practice it, they can be punished or be ostracized.

To make changes happen, be patient!

The process of change goes through various steps. These steps can be overlapping, sometimes synchronous or sometimes even reversing. The process of change can never be linear. You need to keep pushing for change until enough people practice the same thing. At this level, enough people see enough other people are changing their behavior (for the better). Only then can harmful social norms be eliminated.

Mechanisms that regulate behaviors include social norms, legal norms and moral norms. They work based on the emotions of guilt, fear and shame respectively. If you know how to leverage these emotions to push for change, that's great.

This is the link to the publication.

https://www.unfpa.org/.../pub-pdf/WEB-UNFPASocial_Norms.pdf

Its name is How Changing Social Norms is Crucial in Achieving Gender Equality, published by UNFPA.