This is Part 1 of the Social Norms, Social Change series. For Part 2, click here. It is strongly recommended that you complete Part 1 before beginning Part 2.

About the course

This course is on social norms, the rules that glue societies together. It teaches how to diagnose social norms, and how to distinguish them from other social constructs, like customs or conventions. These distinctions are crucial for effective policy interventions aimed to create new, beneficial norms or eliminate harmful ones. The course teaches how to measure social norms and the expectations that support them, and how to decide whether they cause specific behaviors.  The course is a joint Penn-UNICEF project, and it includes many examples of norms that sustain behaviors like child marriage, gender violence and sanitation practices.

In these lectures, I introduce all the basic concepts and definitions, such as social expectations and conditional preferences, that help us distinguish between different types of social practices like customs, descriptive norms and social norms. Expectations and preferences can be measured, and these lectures explain how to measure them. Measurement is crucial to understanding the nature of the practice you are facing, as well as whether an intervention was or was not successful, and why. In Part 2, we will put into practice all we have learned in Part 1.

Course Certificate:

To register your progress on Agora, please click the "Bookmark This Activity" button on the right of this screen. You can then add the course to your development plan, and, after you have completed the MOOC on Coursera, record your completion of the course. (After clicking "Bookmark This Activity", see "Activity Details" for more information.)

PLEASE NOTE: In order to obtain your FREE Coursera Verified Certificate, you must have a UNICEF email address, and follow the ID verification processes as per Coursera’s instruction. To verify ID, you will need access to a webcam.

For more information on how to get your FREE Coursera Verified Certificate, please refer to this document.

For other common questions, refer to our FAQ.

Register using your @unicef.org email now at:

Part 1: https://www.coursera.org/groups/norms-group/invitation
Part 2: https://coursera.org/groups/social-norms-social-change-ii/invitation

Course Overview:

Watch the following video to learn more about the course content: 

Instructors:


Cristina Bicchieri
S. J. Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics
Department of Philosophy

Focal Contact Points:

Waithira Gikonyo
Senior Learning Officer, Learning and Knowledge Exchange (LKE)
wgikonyo@unicef.org