New research shows what it takes to make society change for the better

Many people are trying to make society better. How to get good solutions to scale up is the real challenge. Social change may depend on the relationship between policies and beneficial behaviors.

The research was conducted by the University of Maine, University of Maine at Augusta, University of Vermont, and Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada.

The researchers studied a behavior that benefits groups, but does not spread without policy support, such as a costly measure to mitigate the effects of climate change. They created a mathematical model using an innovative combination of epidemiological and evolutionary techniques, which mimics a society where agents live in groups and adopt the beneficial behavior of peers, but not if the institutional costs are too high.

Factors considered in the model include the prevalence of non-adopters in a group, the strength of institutions supporting the behavior and the cost of those institutions.

Our model is unique because it combines behavioral change and policy change in a single system, and encourages us to think about social change in a richer way. A new self-reinforcing system that combines policy and behavior is large-scale social change. Timothy Waring, associate professor of social-ecological systems modeling at the University of Maine and co-author of the study, says that this allows us to ask new questions.

The results show that both behavioral change and policy change are needed to achieve large-scale social change. Policy change is critical and can be done on its own.

Sometimes the beneficial behavior can spread too far. In some cases, the spread of behavior beyond groups with supporting policy can reduce its perceived success and slow the spread of the policy.

The simulation suggests that projects that involve both bottom-up viral spread of behavior and top-down policy change may be the best type of solution for largesustainability issues like climate change because they serve as an example and can spread between groups to influence major change.

Waring says that a state wants to spread participation in a new organic composting law which would benefit towns. It takes effort for households to contribute pure organic waste. This is a problem for policy implementation. If towns experiment with systems to help support and spread the behavior, the successful town programs can spread between towns along with household contributions, resulting in effective, large-scale change.

The lead author of the study says that the model can help figure out how to balance bottom-up and top-down effects so that new solutions can scale. It can help determine when we should promote a behavior like composting all over the country to be normalized and when we should focus on a pilot project to show the potential benefits of composting.

Waring said that the team wants to apply these types of models to all sorts of beneficial social change, particularly the challenge of tackling climate change.

The study was published in the Royal Society Open Science.

More information: Laurent Hébert-Dufresne et al, Source-sink behavioural dynamics limit institutional evolution in a group-structured society, Royal Society Open Science (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211743 Journal information: Royal Society Open Science Citation: New research shows what it takes to make society change for the better (2022, April 1) retrieved 1 April 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-04-society.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.