Social norming: *So* key to online safety

I doubt the term "social norming" means much to most people, but it's actually common practice in family life, at school, and on sports teams. It's the culture or behavioral norms we create to teach and model values and ethics for our children – showing up in statements like "we don't say 'hate' in this family" or "we respect the other team." Maybe because it's so second-nature, we don't often think about how powerful social norming can be on the online-safety front. But when the research shows that aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized, we need to take this point very seriously. In fact, we need to move past expecting adults to do the modeling to expecting all community members to do so, especially children – help them see that they are key to their own well-being as well as their community's. Professor and cyberbullying researcher Sameer Hinduja puts this in the school context: "How does this relate to reducing online harassment among elementary, middle, and high school students? Social norming has to do with modifying the environment, or culture within a school, so that appropriate behaviors are not only encouraged, but perceived widely to be the norm," he writes in his blog. The same goes for online community. Virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and social network sites need to foster a culture of civil behavior and citizenship as a vital Net-safety feature of their communities. There has been discussion about the importance of "neighborhood policing" or community self-policing online as well as offline, and I agree. It's vital, and many responsible sites and worlds act quickly on abuse reports. But they need to pair that with social norming to be both preventive and reactive, to provide more complete protection (I call this "the guild effect").

However, as much as we may like it to be, changing the culture is not just up to sites and virtual worlds or schools. It can't be. Because this is a user-driven media environment we're all experiencing now, by definition it's up to all of us, especially the users of a particular virtual world or social site (or classroom, family or neighborhood). So how do we start? As Hinduja puts it, "by focusing attention on the majority of youth who do utilize computers and cellphones in acceptable ways. If I told you that one in five teenagers are cyberbullied, you wouldn’t focus on spreading that fact around your student body. Rather, you would reframe and reconceptualize that research finding, and then create cool and relevant messaging strategies emphasizing that the vast majority of your students [and our children] are using Internet technologies with integrity, discretion, and wisdom, which would hopefully motivate or induce the remainder to get 'on board.' Ideally, the remainder would desire to fit in, would desire to be like everyone else, and would feel an informal compulsion to stop cyberbullying others and start doing the right thing." If we're worried about cyberbullying as a society, we need to get going on this! As Hinduja writes, "Spending too much time painting cyberbullying in alarmist colors may encourage more youth to act in similar ways, since those youth will perceive the act as 'normal' and that 'everyone is doing it'.”

Related links

"Claiming & social norming in social sites"

"Toward fixing teen risky behavior in social sites: Study"

"'21st-century statecraft' at home & school"

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant"

"Social norming & digital citizenship"

"Social norming for risk prevention"

'Claiming' & social norming in social sites

When she found that about half of teens' social media posts "refer to drinking, sex, or violence," University of Wisconsin pediatrics professor Megan Moreno wondered how much of those posts were just claims, USNews.com reports. She still wonders – hard data is hard to gather – but she "thinks some of it is, some is nonsense, and some is a 'gesture of intention'," where someone might be thinking about partying more and is "testing the waters by putting up pictures or writing about it." What she does know, though, she says, is that these posts have a negative "social norming" effect on peers and young children. "Kids do think that what they see on social media sites is real, and the younger they are, the more they believe it. That's important, because teenagers are powerfully influenced by the behavior of their peers." Here's a useful flag for parents and educators and a great new-media-literacy lesson for younger kids: Peers' posts could be more claim than reality, and thinking critically about the posts of people they know is a great step toward exercising similar critical judgment about what's reported in the overall media environment, from blogs to TV news. [See also "Fictionalizing their profiles."]

Peer mentors fight bullying

From the Good Idea Department: In a program called "CyberMentors," London-based nonprofit Beatbullying is training students 18-25 to mentor younger students online in dealing with bullying, the BBC reports. "Under the scheme, senior cyber-mentors, who all come from colleges or universities, support the work of younger cyber-mentors" right in social network sites. The BBC doesn't say, but presumably there will be a marketing campaign that lets young people know how they can contact mentors through MySpace or Facebook. CompuTeach.co.uk cites figures from the UK's Anti-Bullying Alliance showing that "around 20% of schoolchildren aged 10-11 have been bullied on the Internet within the last year." Here's a review of the concept from US cyberbullying expert and professor Sameer Hinduja, who also blogged recently about how to help youth suffering from Asperger's Syndrome in cyberbullying situations. [See also Professor Hinduja's amazing collection of resources on cyberbullying; "'Cyberbullying' better defined"; "A new, holistic anti-bullying program for schools"; and, for more on peer mentoring, my "Social norming & digital citizenship."]

Afterthought: Social norming & digital citizenship

This is an addendum to my earlier post on digital citizenship. Would appreciate any/all feedback.

About a year ago I heard a great story on NPR about a successful risk-prevention program at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville that "relies on peer counseling, social events and solid information to challenge misperceptions students have about drinking" instead of the less successful rules-and-enforcement programs at most colleges and universities. I thought, "Yes! That's what online-safety education needs!" We'd been working on the "solid information" part for years (often hobbled by misrepresentation of the research in order to scare the public). But more emphasis needed to be on the social and peer-counseling part of this risk-prevention discussion, I thought.

That's where digital citizenship comes in. Peer mentoring, social norming, being there for friends engaged in self-destructive behavior, being the sort of bystander who helps end bullying situations demonstrate the "Internet safety" of the participatory Web. Community – a sense of belonging – further reinforces that peer support. Belonging to, conscious citizenship in, a community is protective. I think that kind of peer support might be more automatic or reflexive in communities of strong shared interest like a World of Warcraft guild, a writers group, or fandom, but if the public discussion about Net safety encourages "users" to view themselves as "citizens" or stakeholders in their communities' well-being, we may see more of this in the huge, more general "spaces" like Facebook and MySpace too. After all, these sites aggregate smaller affinity communities, and Facebook is just a giant collection of its members' social networks, each its own mini community.

So maybe – if we all really focus our messaging and education on this protective, empowering approach, on citizenship – "Internet safety" will be largely preventive (of course with intervention for youth engaging in risk), meaningful to young people, a support rather than a barrier to 21st-century teaching and learning in their schools, and part of the solution to eating-disorder, self-harm, and other self-destructive community online.

'Social norming' for risk prevention

This story at NPR.org is not about technology (though very few risk-prevention and online-safety stories really are). It's about a successful program in changing social norms to lower student risk, and it might be a model for 1) lowering risk in young people's online experiences - including the reinforcement of self-destructive behavior such as cutting, eating disorders, and substance abuse - and 2) educating youth about digital citizenship and positive peer support. The program, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, "relies on peer counseling, social events and solid information to challenge misperceptions students have about drinking" instead of the rules-and-enforcement programs at most colleges and universities. Proof of effectiveness: unlike at colleges across the US, where the number of alcohol-related deaths is on the rise, at UV Charlottesville, "no student has died from intoxication or an accident linked to drinking since 1998" and "the number of students who say they have driven while intoxicated has dropped by more than half since the prevention and education program started."