Hana Shepherd

Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools

Significance Despite a surge in policy and research attention to conflict and bullying among adolescents, there is little evidence to suggest that current interventions reduce school conflict. Using a large-scale field experiment, we show that it is possible to reduce conflict with a student-driven intervention. By encouraging a small set of students to take a public stance against typical forms of conflict at their school, our intervention reduced overall levels of conflict by an estimated 30%. Network analyses reveal that certain kinds of students (called “social referents”) have an outsized influence over social norms and behavior at the school. The study demonstrates the power of peer influence for changing climates of conflict, and suggests which students to involve in those efforts. Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anticonflict intervention across 56 schools with 24,191 students. After comprehensively measuring every school’s social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20–32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged their public stance against conflict at school. Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 30% over 1 year. The effect was stronger when the seed group contained more “social referent” students who, as network measures reveal, attract more student attention. Network analyses of peer-to-peer influence show that social referents spread perceptions of conflict as less socially normative.

Stopping the Drama: Gendered Influence in a Network Field Experiment

Drawing on theories of social norms, we study the relative influence of female and male students using a year-long, network-based field experiment of an anti-harassment intervention program in a high school. A randomly selected subset of highly connected students participated in the intervention. We test whether these highly connected females and males influenced other students equally when students and teachers considered the problem of “drama”—peer conflict and harassment—to be associated with girls more than with boys. Exposure to male, but not female, intervention students caused decreased perceptions of the acceptability of harassment and decreased participation in negative behavior. Status beliefs became activated through the intervention program: gender differences in influence stem from higher levels of respect afforded to highly connected males in the program. The results support an account of social influence as it occurs across time in conjunction with other group processes.

Fertility Preferences and Cognition: Religiosity and Experimental Effects of Decision Context on College Women

Better models of culture and cognition may help researchers understand fertility and family formation. We examine cognition about fertility using an experimental survey design to investigate how fertility preferences of college women are affected by two prompts that bring to mind fertility-relevant factors: career aspirations and financial limitations. We test the effects of these prompts on fertility preferences and ask how effects vary with respondent religiosity, an aspect of social identity related to fertility preferences. We find significant effects of treatment on fertility preferences when accounting for religiosity: less religious women who considered their career aspirations or financial limitations reported smaller desired family size, but this effect was attenuated for more religious women. Our study demonstrates how fertility preferences are shaped by decision contexts for some socio-demographic groups. We discuss how the findings support a social-cognitive model of fertility.