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Social norming: SO key to online safety

February 5, 2010 By Anne 11 Comments

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 cultural 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

  • “Assessing Bullying in New Jersey Secondary Schools: Applying the Social Norms Model to Adolescent Violence”: Profs. David W. Craig and Wesley Perkins, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2008
  • “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”
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Filed Under: Literacy & Citizenship, Risk & Safety, social norms Tagged With: bullying, cyberbullying, Sameer Hinduja, social norming

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Luisa says

    April 23, 2010 at 2:58 am

    The values and behavior of the children really depends on how they were brought up by their parents.

    Reply
  2. Patricia says

    February 9, 2010 at 11:56 pm

    Glad you are bringing attention to the power of social norming, Anne. It is critical as a prevention tool for encouraging online civility.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Shaping Youth » Recap of White House Conf on Bullying Prevention, Pt.1 says:
    March 19, 2011 at 8:56 pm

    […] “Social norming: *So* key to online safety” […]

    Reply
  2. The goal for digital citizenship: Turn it into a verb! | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    July 27, 2010 at 12:04 am

    […] “Social norming: *So* key to online safety” // Share| Permalink Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Monday, July 26, 2010, at 11:59 pm by Anne. Filed in Online Safety 3.0, digital citizenship, digital media, online safety, social Web, social media and tagged A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, digital age, digital citizenship, digital media, global village, Jeffrey Rosen, online safety, social media, social norming, social norms. […]

    Reply
  3. Clicks & cliques: *Really* meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    July 23, 2010 at 7:51 pm

    […] we know and don’t know – too much negative social norming that has got to be addressed (see this about the vital role of positive social […]

    Reply
  4. Schools’ cyberbullying quandary | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    July 6, 2010 at 7:20 pm

    […] “Social norming: *So* key to online safety” // Share| Permalink Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Tuesday, July 6, 2010, at 7:19 pm by Anne. Filed in bullying, cyberbullying, cyberbullying prevention, parenting, school bullying, school discipline, school policy, schools, social media and tagged Charisse Nixon, cyberbullying, Nancy Willard, New York Times, Patricia Agatston, Robin Kowalski, Rosalind Wiseman, safe schools, school policy, Stan Davis, Susan Limber. […]

    Reply
  5. Larry Magid: Report to Congress: Media literacy, not fear, can protect youth online | Online Education says:
    June 5, 2010 at 4:51 am

    […] towards reducing risk online and off. We recommend avoidance of scare tactics and we promote the social norms approach to risk […]

    Reply
  6. Larry Magid: Report to Congress: Media Literacy, Not Fear, Can Protect Youth Online « Read NEWS says:
    June 5, 2010 at 3:25 am

    […] towards reducing risk online and off. We recommend avoidance of scare tactics and we promote the social norms approach to risk […]

    Reply
  7. Formspring: What’s really going on? | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    May 6, 2010 at 9:54 pm

    […] What does work: helping young people see that civility is actually – statistically – the “social norm” […]

    Reply
  8. Principal’s anti-Facebook plan: Is banning Web sites the fix? | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    May 4, 2010 at 5:47 pm

    […] “Social norming: *So* key to online safety” // Share| Permalink Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Tuesday, May 4, 2010, at 3:55 pm by blogadmin. Filed in Facebook, Uncategorized, bullying, cyberbullying, cyberbullying prevention, school bullying, school policy and tagged Anthony Orsini, bullying, cyberbullying, Facebook, Formspring, Ira Socol, social norms, whole-school. […]

    Reply
  9. Reflection on filters, social media & school | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    May 2, 2010 at 10:02 pm

    […] school” and social-norming approach to bullying and cyberbullying. Absolutely (see this and this). But why do online/offline risk prevention only around the academic part of school? We’ve […]

    Reply

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