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ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

Modelling social norms of water conservation

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, pages 624–625 (2017)Cite this article

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Social norms are the dominant behavioural patterns in a group that affect how people follow rules and regulations. A new modelling study shows, for different localities around the world, how the combination of biophysical context and social norms affects cooperation in water conservation.

Carrots and sticks are not sufficient alone for effective environmental regulation. Compliance with regulations is also dependent on social attitudes, which vary between different cultural contexts. Social norms are expected to play a critical role in the effectiveness of collective action problems, such as managing common resources such as water and forest, or the cessation of smoking in public places1. How do social norms affect natural resource management? In this issue of Nature Human Behaviour, Castilla-Rho and colleagues2 present a computational model in which they model social norms of farmers that affect their decision on water pumping in diverse, biophysically relevant hydrological situations. Furthermore, they use data from the World Values Survey3 to provide a cultural context in which the farmer agents are interacting. Farmers experience governmental regulation on the pumping rates, but cultural context and social norms define whether there is compliance with those regulations.

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  1. School of Sustainability and the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, 85287-5502, AZ, USA

    Marco A. Janssen

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  1. Marco A. Janssen
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Correspondence to Marco A. Janssen.

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Janssen, M.A. Modelling social norms of water conservation. Nat Hum Behav 1, 624–625 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0196-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0196-0

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