Social tipping and behavior change
Development organizations, policy makers, and practitioners of various kinds are widely engaged in efforts to steer cultural evolution in ways that improve human welfare. An especially influential hypothesis is that social learning based on coordination and conformity creates multiple equilibria and tipping points at the population level. Consequently, if a society has a harmful cultural tradition, individuals can do little to alleviate the suffering that occurs as a result of this tradition. They are embedded in a society in equilibrium on the wrong side of a tipping point. Individuals who deviate from the tradition can only increase their suffering. Nonetheless, a policy maker, broadly conceived, can intervene, engineer a coordinated move across the tipping point, and social learning will switch from supporting a harmful tradition to supporting a welfare-improving alternative. In this way, policy makers can recruit cultural evolutionary processes to activate beneficial behavior change. We have collaborated extensively with development agencies on projects built around this logic, especially FGC in Sudan and sex-selective abortion in Armenia. This research, often quite applied in nature, has fed back into our research program on cultural evolution more broadly. In particular, it has convinced us that future progress on the study of cultural evolution will require a collective reckoning with the wild heterogeneity in social learning strategies that real social learners seem to exhibit.
