The psychology and sociology of "unpopular norms"

[Aimless]

http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017...ogy-resistance

"Unpopular norms" have long been the subject of study by people who simply can't accept that people are dicks. The latest US election has given social scientists a great opportunity to apply their knowledge about unpopular norms to a very pressing real-world problem.

The concept and the research is interesting--and, I think, useful, eg. whe it comes to effecting changes in organizational culture--but I believe the author of the Vox article makes an important mistake in disregarding the extreme polarization in current US politics, and how that polarization interacts with various strategies for social change. While a norm may be unpopular in the general population, it may be extremely popular in one's own social group or tribe. Trump, for example, enjoys a high approval rating among Republicans. It may be low in comparison to some other Republican presidents, but an approval rating over 80% doesn't strike me as being substantially different from one over 90%, for practical purposes. I also believe lessons learned from the research on changing unpopular norms may be difficult to apply in a climate characterized by a fairly high prevalence of authoritarianism.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting subject that will no doubt continue to be relevant for the remainder of the duration of human civilization.^*

More on the topic:

https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/mygsb/...nforcement.pdf

http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc4399934

https://scholar.google.se/scholar?hl...=&as_sdt=1%2C5


_{Currently predicted to last until july 2019}

[Cracky]

I believe the author of the Vox article makes an important mistake in disregarding the extreme polarization in current US politics

I don't even think you need the word _current_ in there. I'd argue that even within tribes unpopular norms have a big effect once you drill down to an issue-by-issue basis. My gut feeling (no sources right now, sorry) is that even within tribes there is no real majority consensus on much anything, but we see these normalized high approval ratings because everyone is so fervently worried that thy might look like they support "the other side". I'd wager the last election cycle, in a vacuum both Hillary and Trump would have had dismal approval ratings but this shadow effect of political polarization boosts them through the roof. But you can apply the same principle, maybe to a lesser extent, to Obama and McCain, Bush and Gore, all the way back to godknows when.