Social Norms Programs Fail

Have you recently visited a campus where posters, flyers and other marketing materials confront students with messages such as, “Most students at our school have five or fewer drinks when they party”? If so, then you have been exposed to a social norms marketing campaign designed to decrease heavy alcohol use among students. We at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Alcohol Studies Program recently published a study evaluating this increasingly popular alcohol prevention practice, used by almost half of four-year colleges in the U.S. Our goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of social norms marketing in curbing destructive alcohol use—and what we found was startling.

Our research showed that schools using social norms marketing campaigns did not experience a decrease in student alcohol consumption. In fact, we found an increase in alcohol consumption on two measures of drinking at these schools, while there was no such increase at schools without social norms programs.

The social norms approach is based on the assumption that many students think that their peers drink more than they actually do—and that this misperception leads students to drink more in order to “fit in.” Social norms marketing attempts to correct this misperception, with the expectation that students will then drink less. The U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies have funded social norms programs, as have some of the largest beer companies in the United States. Anheuser-Busch has pledged $5 million to support a Social Norms Resource Center at Northern Illinois University and also funds campaigns at individual colleges.

Not surprisingly, some supporters of social norms marketing have responded to our study by attacking the validity of our findings. The supporters of social norms marketing believe that this technique works, but they have been unable to provide scientifically credible research showing that it does.

Our study is the first national evaluation of social norms programs, and our findings speak for themselves. Our study is based on a nationally representative sample of U.S. colleges, including responses from three student surveys about alcohol use in 1997, 1999 and 2001. The study also included information from college administrators about their schools’ use of social norms strategies and evaluated seven different measures of student drinking. It looked at social norms programs in every conceivable way to see if they had any effect on heavy alcohol consumption among students. It considered the effects of the social norms program that had been in existence the longest and where the largest proportion of students had been exposed to the programs. It also examined each school individually. The study contrasted all of these factors at 37 colleges that used social norms programs for at least one year to 61 colleges that did not use such programs.

But, in the end, we found no decline in the quantity, frequency or volume of student alcohol intake on social norms campuses. In fact, the percentage of students who drank in the past month and the percentage who consumed 20 or more drinks in the past month increased at social norms schools. Most of these schools had high binge drinking rates at baseline, indicating that many schools with serious drinking problems are turning to social norms.

Why is social norms marketing one of the most popular alcohol prevention programs on college campuses today? It is appealing in part because of its positive, non-threatening approach. College administrators like it because the main message is that drinking is not as big a problem on campus as people think. It does not threaten students with scare tactics or enforcement penalties, and it disregards the sensitive drinking age issue. Nor does it threaten alcohol providers with fines or closures for serving minors or intoxicated customers, which may explain why the alcohol industry has provided financial support for social norms programs on some campuses.

Social norms programs downplay the level of drinking on campus and, in the process, de-emphasize the negative consequences of heavy drinking while normalizing drinking in general. This probably explains why two measures of lighter drinking actually went up at social norms schools—indicating that some abstainers took up drinking and light drinkers increased their consumption.

Heavy alcohol use is the leading threat to the health of college students, not only for the heaviest drinkers, but also for all college students—including those that abstain. Research has shown that students who do not binge drink experience many “secondhand effects” from the binge drinking behavior of other students, such as physical assault, unwanted sexual advances, vandalized property and interruptions of sleep or study.

The widespread adoption of social norms marketing programs has occurred despite the lack of scientific evidence of their effectiveness. While any intervention that can reduce the risks posed by alcohol should be considered, an unproven approach such as social norms does not relieve universities of their responsibility for protecting their students.

Additional research is needed on the impact of social norms marketing before it is taken up by more colleges. In the meantime, colleges need to adopt approaches that are more comprehensive—even if less convenient—to curb the problem of heavy drinking. These approaches should also address the supply of alcohol by limiting high volume sales and low price promotions of alcohol around colleges.

The enforcement of minimum drinking age laws should go beyond catching individual offenders and should ensure that establishments do not profit from such sales.

Social norms marketing may be easy to implement, but that does not mean that it works. H.L. Mencken may have been right when he said, “For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

Henry Wechsler is the Director of the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Studies Program and the author of Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on College Campuses. The full study on social norms marketing can be found at: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cas.