March 15: Networks, Connections and the Social Actor

[Emilie Dubois]

Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini and Vladas Griskevikus, 2008, “A Room
with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental
Conservation in Hotels,” Journal of Consumer Research, vol 35:472-482.
Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, 2009, Connected: The
Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
(Boston: Little Brown), chs. TBA
Schor, The Overspent American (Basic Books 1998) ch 4.

[Monique]

This week’s readings give us insight into the role that social norms
and networks can play in influencing consumption behaviors.

I really enjoyed reading the hotel towel study because I had heard
about it from a few sources and it has practical implications for
influencing conservation behaviors. One question that I have is in
reference to the method for testing the various manipulations used in
experiment 2. The researchers asked participants who were not part of
the study to indicate the extent to which the social identities
present in each of the manipulations reflected their own. Was this a
necessary step in the research process? How valid is such a comparison
when the participants in the test did not participate in the hotel
study and were not matched one any indicated criteria to those
participants?


Christakis and Fowler provide a nice introduction to social network
analysis as a tool to understand social behaviors. After reading the
three chapters, I am more interested in exploring how the method,
which examines interconnections and interactions between individuals
in a group, could fit into my own research. Despite the potential that
this method may hold, do the authors overstate the predictive power of
the model via the examples that they present in the book? Are they
overstating the “nature” of social networks themselves through the
description of the role that genes and evolutionary biology play in
the construction of social networks?


On Mar 14, 6:08 pm, Emilie Dubois <emilie.anne.dub...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Gemma]

I am interested in the “psychology of competitive spending” presented in The Overspent American and how it connects to the chapter “It’s In Our Nature” from Connected. Professor Schor states “we have more trouble seeing the counterparts of these behaviors in the American middle class, and in ourselves” and asks “why do people say they don’t try to ‘keep up’ when they do?” (90-91). I agree that it could be that people sincerely believe they do not feel pressured to keep up, or they consciously do not feel comfortable admitting it or even that adults are not socialized to talk about it (93-94). Christakis and Fowler answer this question by claiming it is part of human nature to “want what others to whom we are connected want” (222). We have evolved with other humans and are connected to them through various social networks, which classifies human nature as “homo dictyous.” The way we are ranked within these networks and our level of transitivity lies within our genes. To me, this seems to complicate the problem of overspending. How can the cycle of work and spend be diminished if the problem lies even deeper than our capitalist structure in a part of human nature that cannot be altered? “Social networks may serve the adaptive function of transmitting emotional states, material resources, and information between individuals” (235). Where would a person begin if he or she wanted to change a nation’s consumption patterns? “The impact of [highly consumerist households] consumption ripples through the system,” which relates to the Three Degrees of Influence Rule. Is it possible to impact these upper class families to change their consumption patterns with readily available information catered to their elite social identity, such as in the hotel sign experiment? How could this kind of information be made available or even desirable?

[Tom Laidley]

VBN (Value-Belief-Norm) theory is pretty big in the 'environmental behavior' (or pro-environmental behavior, more accurately) literature (yes, there is a literature...). While it may not necessarily stress the concept of social capital in influencing the actualization of behaviors via norms, it does contain it as a part of the theory (Paul Stern would call it "community expectations"). While I think these are important contentions to keep in mind, and need to be part of any comprehensive theory of human behavior in general (and perhaps even moreso with respect to what we conceive of as 'sustainable' behavior), I do think most theorists are pretty reductionist in their approach. They do often mention structural constraints, but 1) they're often lip-service rather than a real engagement with how those forces may affect attitudes, norms, and of course, behaviors, and 2) social theorists, especially psychologists (whose best interest is to stress that these things are the result of stuff psychologists study, as opposed to what sociologists often look at) often consign stuff like gender, class, and race- the sociologist's holy triad- to irrelevancy based on quantitative studies which ask people to situate their beliefs on Likert scales. While that may sound flippant, I don't begrudge anyone from having to do stuff like that in order to get a 1,000 person sample. I have far bigger problems with social scientists forging these broad contentions on studies which survey 100 undergraduates, which are closer to Family Feud than AJS or ASR.

And really, isn't it a little ridiculous to posit that norm activation takes place in a vacuum? I have no doubt that Goldstein et al are right in their contention that invoking what other people do is more effective than laying some ethical or moral conundrum on them. Still, what hotel was it? Who were the guests? (And didn't the effect- though measurable- only amount to a relatively small increase overall anyway?) Moreover, how does this process operate when costs are high? The costs of throwing a towel on the rack as opposed to the floor are zero- what about stuff that incurs even negligible amounts? I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing this line of research- I think if, for instance, electric companies printed the average household electricity usage in your neighborhood (in the context of the average size of the house or apartment), you would think a little more about leaving those lights on, or keeping the A/C a few degrees higher. But when we begin talking about values and norms without any context, my eyes begin to glaze over. In the NY Times article, Cialdini talks about how it's difficult for Americans to envision stuff like wind turbines because it's not part of our normative social fabric. Well, OK...but isn't that not so much a difference of norms as of culture, which is a huge thing that's missing from all of this (and which sociology can at least lend some thought to)? In fact, forget about that- let's talk nuts and bolts stuff, like infrastructure. This isn't Denmark, with 6 million people on the coast (and the high winds to make those turbines economically desirable, which may be an antecedent condition for approval of them being an accepted social norm). This is America, a sprawling, geographically dispersed collection of metropolises with 310 million people, not all of which are within a feasible distance from these power sources (power transmission is characterized by rapid degradation, and battery technology simply isn't there yet- nor is it innovation in that realm exponential, like with computer processers). If power generation via wind is half the cost of coal, is it still culturally, normatively, etc. undesirable? I wouldn't think so. This is a time in which rational choice theory- though flawed when looking at human behavior, which is so often irrational- can be really valuable, along with culture, class, etc. etc.

[Gerone Lockhart]

On Connected by Christakis and Fowler:

"The powerful effect of social networks on individual behavior and
outcomes suggests that people do not have complete control over their
own choices." (32) Two important implications. When seeking to
understand others, it is important to understand the networks in which
they are embedded. Second, one of the most important ways in which we
can limit or extend our influence and effectiveness is--to the extent
that we have a choice--through the choice of networks.

Also, given the nature of social networks, it seems that the negative
and positive consequences of webs of relationships cannot be fully
anticipated. Both well-being and "contagion" can be magnified.
Networks (interconnections and interactions between people) give rise
to aspects not seen within the individuals participating in these
interactions. (32) The whole produces something qualitatively
different than the mere sum of its parts.

[weiwei]

This week’s readings are mainly about how social networks shape
people’s lives. Goldstein and Cialdini (2008) did a very interesting
research to discuss how connections affected people’s decision makings
and further influenced environmental protection. The authors found
that although individuals considered the social identity of citizens
or gender to be personally most important, they were more likely to be
influenced by the norms of their immediate surroundings, such as same
room identity. I also think this, to some extent, can be explained by
Christakis and Fowler’s Three Degrees Rule—“everyone would have been
connected to everyone else by three degrees or less” (:29)

Despite the fact that social networks do affect American’s
decision-makings and their economic lives, I have always been confused
with the question why America, which is famous for its individualism,
free will and independent entity, is influenced by the people around
them. As Schor (1998) argued that although ads and media were the
mechanics that drove people to buy, the more powerful stimulator of
such desires is what friends and family have (1998:69). This is more
likely what Chinese used to do in terms of its high collectivistic
culture. America’s former individualist culture has shifted towards
collectivism?

[Emilie Dubois]

According to Schor:
“Today, in a world where being middle-class is not good enough for
many people and indeed that social category seems like an endangered
species, securing a place means going upscale. But, when everyone’s
doing it upscaling can mean simple keeping up” (96).
And ... “the greater the weight people place on the social comparison
aspect of their consumption, relative to other aspects like function,
aesthetics, or convenience, the greater the social irrationality of
upscaling” (108).

According to Goldstein, Ciadini, and Griskevicius:
“Even though the provincial norm for the frequency of guests’ towel
reuse in a particular hotel room is not any more diagnostic of
effective or approved behavior than the other norms – and the same-
room message references the norms of the least meaningful group in the
experiment – this condition produced the highest level of towel
reuse” (4).

According to Christakis and Fowler:
“Notions of collective guilt and collective revenge [or consumption]
that underlie cascades of violence [or sustainability] seem strange
only when we regard responsibility as a personal attribute. Yet in
many settings, morality resides in groups rather than in
individuals” (5).

According to Cialdini in Rosenthal’s NY Times article:
“People need to be in alignment with their contemporaries,” he said.
“It validates them. It becomes something they should do and can
do” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/weekinreview/13nimby.html).

Maybe I am unduly simplifying this week’s readings in the service of
making them square with one another, but they do seem to triangulate
around roughly the same idea – that relative social position matters
for both short and long term behavior. After wading through the
formalized language of “A Room with a Viewpoint” I learned that
information about the behavior of people who stay in your hotel room
(provincial norms) is more convincing than aggregate information about
people who stayed in the hotel (global norms) as well as information
about social identity related to gender and citizenship. The
predominance of immediate position within a group, even if that group
is an imagined social network of previous hotel room guests, over
static social identity is differently affirmed in The Overspent
American and Connected. Thinking about patterns of human behavior
within the social networks they inhabit complicates the project of
bringing about sustainability in earnest. The task feels overwhelming
when I think of it as changing group, rather than individual,
preferences, practices, and priorities.

Using the evidence from Professor Schor’s analysis of the Telecom
employees as a model of social upscaling, what would it take to rework
the reward system of employment so that immediate complaints about,
for example, Park Slope’s “inconvenient” bike path, would fade in the
light of summarily revolutionized social norms? What proposals would
be robust enough to simultaneously change individual practices by
intervening to activate a connection to a personally salient social
network and to ensure that the norms of the referent group are
environmentally minded?

[Shan]

This week, I have a couple of questions coming from two of our
readings. These are messy questions--I am not clear what I am asking--
but I am going to make a stab at it, anyway.

First, Goldstein, Cialdini, and Griskevicius argue in their article on
social norms on towel reuse in hotels that sharing a setting with
others makes people more likely to follow descriptive norms than
sharing social identity does. I would like to ask the group if you
think this is true or not based on your own research and your own
readings beyond this class. The idea that context shapes consumer
behavior more than identification with other people is both
fascinating and has huge implications for all sorts of issues,
including housing, education, religion. Part of my reason for wanting
to hear more from the class is that, in theology, there is a strong
movement toward doing contextual theology, which attempts to situate
any theological argument in a particular context and eschews the idea
that a theological meta-narrative can be established across the board
for all people in all times and all places. In some ways, the doing of
contextual theology is just one more path toward rejecting the
Enlightenment era's confidence in the march of history, but I am
thinking that the pattern discussed by our researchers might actually
lend some additional credence toward the doing of contextual theology.
If it is the case that physical proximity and shared setting are
crucial in shaping human behavior, then theologians really are
irresponsible if we try to do our job without focusing on how people
live out their faith commitments within their particular context(s)
and in relations to others in those (that) context(s). Really, I guess
what I'm wondering is how applicable this kind of finding might be in
my field, which focuses on church life and the kinds of choices people
make about the life of faith.

Second, on a very different note, Schor says in "The Overspent
American" that "the link between television and spending is that what
we see on TV inflates our sense of what's normal" and has an effect,
"upward distortion" regarding our consumer expectations (80). This
comment (and much of what comes in the section in which it is found)
relies on a particular theory of representation: that what we see does
shape not only what we expect or want to see, but also how we practice
our consumerism. This idea conflicts with a thesis proposed by art
critic David Hickey in an essay called "Pontormo's Rainbow," found in
his book "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy in America" (1997),
in which he says that what we want to see represented is not
necessarily what we want to see or experience in everyday life. His
thesis makes me wonder if what we see on TV is really what we imagine
for our lives and will act to get for ourselves through our
consumption of goods. Now, I will admit that Hickey's point of
departure is the effect of cartoon violence on children, so perhaps
comparing his theory of representation with Schor's is inappropriate
and unfair. Still, a question stays with me about Schor's idea because
of my long-term engagement with Hickey's perspective: Does our media
(TV, movies, YouTube, etc.) tell us what we want to experience and
possess? Do we have the kind of relationship with the media that it
can direct and shape us to this degree? Could other factors (which are
masked) be working to cause this upward distortion, making TV and
other media the easiest to blame? I am not necessarily disagreeing
with Schor, but I am wondering what theory of representation is
operative here and to what degree it is supported by evidence not only
from consumer practices, but also from other sectors of our
experience, like childhood violence.

[L Carfagna]

First, I'd like to reply to Shan directly.  Your connections to contextual theology seem absolutely relevant and I personally believe you are right to call the work of theologians irresponsible if it does not address as you said "how people live out their faith commitments within their particular context(s) and in relations to others in those (that) context(s)" - but I'm a sociologist, so I might be biased.  It also seems interesting to me that Christakis and Fowler took up the question of spirituality in the last chapter we read, situating "God" in a social network, thus connecting all people through "God".  I wonder the reverse of your first question - what is it that theology can teach us sociologists about what we've read this week?  What is it that you know about a "life of faith" that we might learn about a "life of social justice" or a "life of sustainability"?  

I was most impressed this week by Christakis and Fowler's analysis of voting behavior.  Learning about rational choice as a "perspective" in the social sciences, I endured one of the lectures where a Professor accurately describes the metrics behind the assertion that "voting doesn't matter".  Fast forward a year later and I was working on the Obama campaign in conservative working class areas.  The lecture no longer seemed accurate; if people weren't giving us praise and stories of all their friends who were voting for Obama, they were giving us hell, kicking us off their lawns, and telling us about everyone they knew that would never vote for Obama.  What seemed to really matter was that whatever opinion they had, they were typically inclined to stand on that opinion with a group of real friends or media friends, like the political pundits that come to dinner each night with their own group of expert friends.  No one stood alone on their choices it seemed like, even when their vote only counted once and was just for them.  Schor's work seems to get at this, too.  Consumer choices weren't made in a rational choice vacuum, but in reference to either real or TV people.  Further, Goldstein et al show how provincial norms meant more than identity in the case of towel reuse in hotels. 

It seems like all three readings built upon the dialogue we've been constructing all semester.  To me, it seems like they dig out some of the mechanisms behind taste, habitus, cultural capital, etc.  It's not to say that we do what we do because everybody else is doing it, like a middle school lunchroom.  But, the evidence behind our connections is quite compelling.  It's obvious how environmentally destructive behavior (like overconsumption fueled by status) is orchestrated by our connections - but what about change?  Will sustainability have to become normative to a reference group that is important to us in order for us to adopt it?  Will it have to become provincially normative? Will it have to be a value embedded within our networks?  In my opinion, this seems like the most stable and long term option - but how do we get there and do we have time to get there?  This model would make our often criticized "green consumers" central, if their only major flaw is that products might not necessarily green.  However, we've discussed how two huge flaws are accessibility to/affordability of "green products" and the overconsumption of products, whether green or otherwise.  

Why must our social capital be so dependent on stuff?  

[Margaret Lister]

Like Luca, I felt that the three readings connected many of the concepts we've been talking about. I found the hotel study and Connected the most interesting, as I do not have a background in sociology. I was really struck by the way each reading placed the consumer in a tangled net of "others". Much of modern philosophy has struggled to define the "self" as opposed to the "other" and investigated concepts such as the "intrinsic nature of being", but these studies tell us that this cannot be definitively proved.

These readings also answer the question of how to we try to be more sustainable, or integrate change. Getting the core of the network involved is clearly key, but it is also clear that the whole network needs to be involved.

[Hyemi]

This week’s articles have helped me understand the influence of
networks on consumers’ behavior. I have a great interest in networks,
but I do not understand the principles or fundamentals of networks
well. Thanks to this week’s articles, I have a new view on the main
ideas.

The Overspent American describes the general consumption sequence of
"see-want-borrow-buy" and our upscaling of competitive consumerism
through social comparison. According to this book, consumers do not
try to keep up with the real Joneses, but rather with imaginary people
on television who seem to have upper-class or luxurious lifestyles.
Based on this continuous social comparison, consumption behaviors lead
to buying more and more, even what we don’t need.

Interestingly, this result seems to be slightly at odds with
Connected. Christakis and Fowler introduce the “three degrees of
influence” on social networks, arguing that “everything…tends to
ripple through our network, having an impact on our friends (one
degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and even our friends’
friends’ friends (three degrees)” (28). Reading this line, I think
that the three-degrees-of-influence rule is more related to the real
Joneses than to imaginary media characters.

Goldstein, Cialdini, and Griskevikus reveal the effectiveness of
descriptive norms through practical experiments in a hotel. Their
experiments demonstrated that descriptive norms have a powerful
motivational impact in the real world. However, I had difficulty
understanding the result of experiment two. Nevertheless, the
descriptive norms are strong motivators. In my opinion, descriptive
norms as described in this article represent a new sphere of networks
different from those in the aforementioned two articles.

These three explanations are all applicable in understanding social
networks.

I would like to focus on the role of media such as internet in
contemporary society given its increasing influence.

On Mar 14, 6:08 pm, Emilie Dubois <emilie.anne.dub...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[John Petroff]

As I read through Christakis and Fowler and then Goldstein, Cialdini,
and Griskevicius, I had one continuous thought in the back of my head:
social networks are an important piece of the puzzle to reversing the
trend of unsustainable consumption. In early 2007, a lot of people
would have said that Obama was as likely to be elected president as
the US was to develop a sustainable economy (obviously neither seemed
likely). But he did it and largely due to the effectiveness of social
networks. Can sustainable consumption rely on the same instrument?
Moreover, these studies on social networks support the approach of
targeting consumers rather than producers or the government which we
have discussed in previous classes. Enthusiastically and naively, I
thought that I should just start telling my friends that sustainable
consumption is better than unsustainable consumption; according to
Christakis and Fowler, that simple action would eventually affect half
of the world (p. 29). And then I got to Professor Schor's reading
where I discovered that networks can also lead to detrimental
behavior. The same social force that I thought may be the answer
unfortunately is a major part of the problem and has been for decades.
Social networks are obviously powerful, and I have not given up on
their ability to improve the world's situation in regards to
sustainable consumption, but when will the shift in momentum come?
What happens to the person whose friends are both competitive
consumers and ethically conscious consumers? These questions remind me
of the figures on page 197 of Christakis and Fowler that show the
polarity of politics except that the two opposing groups do not seem
so equal in size. I am inclined to go back through Christakis and
Fowler to see which types of people cause bigger ripples in social
networks (i.e. centrally located vs peripherally located, more
transitive vs. less transitive, etc.)

[Noel Munoz]

In Connected they state, "... a social network is like a commonly owned forest: we all stand to benefit from it, but we also must work together to ensure it remains healthy and productive." (p.31) This statement along with Professor Schor's section on "Practical Reasons to Keep on Keeping", specifically the paragraph that starts with, "For everyone, socializing costs money." (p101) These two quotes bring up the issue of the types of social networks that are being created in this day and age. Why do many of the activities that are suppose to improve ties within networks are associated with consuming? Have the members of American society become so ingrained with the idea of consuming as a way to develop social networks that they have forgotten about building meaningful relationships through other avenues? 

Inequality has been growing over the past couple of decades between the "haves" and "have-nots" and Prof. Schor does a great job of illustrating how consumption has played a large role in this growing disparity. One of the individuals interviewed in Overspent American says, "...there are few ways of socializing "that don't have expenses tied to it." (p.101) A social network that does not allow for more participation will in the end only cause it to become weaker and I think that this is a fact that is becoming all too real in American society. As the rich get richer the poor stay poor, the social network that should be growing stronger within the US is instead falling apart. This should be a concern because if people do not feel connected, then how will people work together to deal with issues like the environment or any other issues that have consequences for the whole network?

[John Petroff]

I just stumbled upon this video from a TED talk in Boston...very
applicable to this week's readings and generally very interesting.
Enjoy.
http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html