Complete Coverage

‘Social Norms’ Seen to Keep Students on Right Track

Researchers find promise in countering perceptions that 'everybody is doing it.'

Colorado educator Scoot Crandall once measured his success in persuading young people to avoid smoking, drinking, or drugs by his ability to make girls cry. Mr. Crandall, at the time a guidance counselor in the Poudre school district just north of Denver, would go into classrooms, tell nightmarish tales of the dangers of substance abuse, and watch the tears roll.

Then a district administrator convinced Mr. Crandall that, as heart-wrenching as his talks were, they were not having much of an impact on students’ behavior. “You’re making ’em cry, my friend,” Mr. Crandall recalls his colleague saying, “but they get to high school and junior high school, and they’re doing what they always did.”

That’s when Mr. Crandall turned to the “social norms” approach to intervention. Rather than scare students out of misbehaving, social-norms educators use survey data on students’ actual behavior to underscore that, when it comes to avoiding risky habits, many students are already...