We’ve spent much of the past month finalizing topics and speakers for our upcoming conference, Whole Grains: the New Norm, which is only three months away!

Choosing the very best speakers for a conference gives you a great excuse to talk to all kinds of fascinating people. One topic we knew we wanted to include was the new science of social norms – how our actions are shaped by what we perceive as standard, normal behavior.  

Take, for example, the issue of saving the environment. Robert Cialdini did an experiment aimed at getting hotel guests to reuse their towels. If the guests were asked to “help the hotel save energy” 20% reused their towels. If the card in a guest’s room said “help save resources for future generations” 31% reused. The top motivator? 41% of guests reused their towels when they were told it was the norm among other guests.

We called some of the country’s top researchers to learn how social norms might help tip the balance to whole grains. Jerry Burger, Professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University, explained the basics to us.

“People figure, if a lot of other people are doing it, it must be a good thing. What seems to be going on in the research is that it’s not like peer pressure. With peer pressure, people change their behavior according to what they want others to think of them. Social norms are a different process. When we see a lot of people doing something, it seems like collective wisdom. There must be something to it.”

Burger seems to be saying that social norms are more likely to determine what you do even when no one’s necessarily watching – while peer pressure is all about what others see you doing.  And yet with social norms, says Burger, “If you ask them why they changed, they never say it’s because everyone else is doing it. They’re not aware of why.”

Jennifer Bauerle, Director of the National Social Norms Institute at the University of Virginia (who knew there was an actual institute for this stuff?) gave us some more of the background. Although those of us in the health and nutrition field sometimes wring our hands at the status quo, Bauerle points out that “the majority of people are doing healthy, normal things, or we’d all die out.”

It’s this fact that gave the field of social norms its start. In 1986 Wes Perkins and Alan Berkowitz, both then at Hobart and William Smith Colleges did a study to find out whether binge drinking on college campuses could be reduced simply by telling students the true fact that most students don’t binge drink. The approach was a success, and psychologists and sociologists have been working since then to apply social norms to other circumstances.

We called Wes Perkins and asked him how social norms could be used in nutrition communication messages. Perkins touted the positive nature of the social norms approach, in contrast to most nutrition campaigns that try to convince us we’ll drop dead or develop dread diseases if we don’t eat healthier foods.

“You can’t scare the health into people,” says Perkins. “Maybe if the risk of death or disease was 50% or greater you’d get their attention. But not if you’re going to increase your risk by 1% to 4%!”  

Back in Virginia, Jennifer Bauerle expanded on Perkins’ advice to go positive rather than negative. “Scare tactics have the opposite effect. People tend to say, ‘Oh well. I’m going to die anyway. I might as well have that cheeseburger.’ “ Are statements like Only 1 in 10 people get the recommended amount of whole grains apt to be effective? “That would be self-defeating,” said Bauerle.

It turns out that the time-tested Oldways / WGC approach of finding positive examples of healthy eating and promoting the heck out of them is just what social norms experts recommend. “We like to think of social norms as gathering data, and holding it up like a mirror, then allowing people to act on their own values and make really good choices,” concluded Jennifer Bauerle. “Whatever you focus on expands, so focus on what they’re doing well and not what they’re doing wrong.”

So that’s the plan for our January 31-February 2 conference in Portland, OR. We hope you’ll join us as we shine a spotlight on all the cafeterias and caterers, magazines and manufacturers, homes and hotels, stores and schools where whole grains are now the norm. (Cindy)