Examples include: posters telling immigration officers that some of their colleagues have been caught and punished for selling work visas (‘Never thought of that—I wonder how much they made’); signs in doctors’ surgeries about the number of people who missed their appointments in the last month (‘… so I’m not the only one’); and national campaigns bemoaning the low number of women on top company boards (‘well, we’ve got a woman on our board of twelve, so that’s pretty good, then’).
Similarly, welfare and regulatory systems often inadvertently signal that most people are not to be trusted, since they are routinely built around the assumption, and tests, that people are cheating and breaking the law. The evidence on social norms suggests that such signalling is likely to increase levels of cheating.
Yet it is often possible to flip around these campaigns and effects. Take the example of getting more women on company boards...The normal centrepiece of campaigns to get more women on boards is a statistic along the lines ‘isn’t it shocking that only 25 per cent of board members are women?’ (less in some countries). It is shocking, but it’s also likely to be a message that inadvertently normalises the situation. On the other hand, if such campaigns made the equally valid point that ‘90 percent of companies have women on their boards,’ then the signalling is very different.
http://thepsychreport.com/business-org/how-can-governments-and-businesses-avoid-the-big-mistake/
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