Does Social Norms Marketing Work In The Long Run? The Latest Study Says Yes

The latest study on social norms marketing for Michigan State University students over a 14 year period is highly encouraging.  From 2000 to 2014, high-risk drinking dropped significantly faster at MSU than it did for national trends:

• The percentage of MSU students who said they consumed eight or more drinks in one sitting dropped from nearly 28% to 16.5%, a 41% relative decrease.
• The percentage of MSU students who said they drove after drinking fell by 58% as well.
• Additionally, another forthcoming study found that the percentage of MSU students who said they drank on 10 or more days in the past month dropped from 24.1% to 13.4% by 2016, while it remained largely flat at the national level.

That is quite impressive.  Considering how MSU went from being consistently in The Princeton Review's list of top 20 "party schools" to no longer being on that list anymore, that really says something.

How does social norms marketing work?  Young people often falsely believe that their peers are drinking, smoking, vaping, toking, or using other substances much more than is actually the case, and they feel pressure to conform to such inaccurate norms.  This is called "pluralistic ignorance".  By simply setting the record straight about the actual numbers, it tends to reduce the use of such substances overall when the "reign of error" is corrected.  In contrast, moral panics exaggerate the levels of use, which tends to increase the use of such substances, in what is known as a "deviancy amplification spiral".

Most other studies agree on the effectiveness of the social norms approach.  The effects are quite robust and seem to occur fairly quickly in most studies.  So what about the handful of studies that seem to disagree?  It is true that poorly designed programs, unsurprisingly, do not work very well.  And for colleges and demographics in which heavy drinking is most entrenched, it stands to reason that it can take longer to show any effects, longer than the short time periods of most studies on the matter.  Attitudes generally have to change first before behavior does, as a rule.  But as we see, Michigan State is clearly an example of a formerly entrenched heavy drinking "party school" that did show massive declines in both high-risk drinking practices as well as drunk driving and the frequency of drinking.  And those declines were in fact quite long-term, continuing at least a decade and a half with still no signs of stalling.

(Looks like William DeJong was right the first time after all, even if the alcohol outlet density in college towns may moderate or confound the results in his later research on the subject.)

Social norms marketing is clearly a highly effective yet inexpensive way to reduce harmful alcohol and other substance use/abuse, and best of all, it does not violate anyone's civil rights or liberties at all.  In contrast, legalistic crackdowns and so-called "environmental management" programs like "A Matter of Degree" are expensive, authoritarian, intrusive, ageist, and can be quite difficult to implement in practice.  So what are we waiting for?

You May Not Like It, But Here's the Answer to (At Least Greatly Reducing) College Rape and Sexual Assault

(NOTE:  This is an updated version of a post from 2018)

As we had noted in a previous post five years ago, rape and sexual assault is a persistent epidemic in the USA, including (but not limited to) college campuses nationwide.  Lately, the chattering classes have been endlessly wringing their hands about it for years, but little real progress has been made in recent years, and since the Trump administration began we seem to have even regressed a bit in that regard, the #MeToo movement notwithstanding.

Most rapes and sexual assaults, especially those involving college students on or near campus, are committed by people known to the victim, and many if not most of those involve alcohol to one degree or another, whether by the perpetrator, the victim, or both.  We should first and foremost note that the only thing that actually causes rape is the rapists themselves, period.   While alcohol (among other substances) can indeed fuel it and is often used as a weapon to incapacitate victims, rape would simply not happen without rapists, period.  And the onus should always fall on men not to rape in the first place, instead of falling on women not to "get themselves raped".  The fact that so many people still deny such an obvious truth in 2018 shows just how far we have yet to go towards eliminating or even reducing this epidemic, and those who blame or otherwise put the onus on potential or actual victims are in fact part of the problem.

We seriously need to drain the proverbial swamp of rape culture, yesterday, and thus revoke the rapists' social license to operate.  Culturally, we need to tackle the root causes of sexual violence by rejecting the highly toxic "commodity model" of sexuality and replacing it with the "performance model" (while also avoiding the negative connotations and pitfalls of the word "performance"), and more generally rejecting the "dominator model" of society and replacing it with the "partnership model".  And for alcohol, we need to recognize that while adopting a "Prohibition-Lite" approach of any sort is most likely to backfire and would throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, its link with sexual violence still needs to be dealt with in the meantime as cultural changes can take much time to occur.

So what measures can be taken in the very near term to quickly reduce or at least take the dangerous edge off of this seemingly intractable epidemic?  The reader may or may not like the answer, but here goes:

1. Lower the legal drinking age to 18, yesterday, full stop.  The 21 drinking age makes drinking that much more dangerous than it has to be by forcing it underground, which can put young drinkers in more dangerous situations that increase the risk of sexual assault, and the law itself can be used as a cudgel to silence victims.
2. Raise the tax on alcoholic beverages, both federally as well as at the state and local level (especially in college towns), with extra levies on bulk alcohol such as kegs, cases, and handles. Studies have shown a significant inverse correlation between alcohol prices and rape in general.
3. Legalize cannabis for everyone 18 and older, yesterday.  Cannabis is clearly the safer choice in that regard, as it is highly unlikely to fuel violence or be used as a date-rape drug the way that alcohol all too often is.
4. Pass "Yes Means Yes" laws (aka affirmative consent laws) similar to California's.  If properly written, these laws will essentially eliminate the concept of so-called "gray area rape" by putting the onus on the initiator of sexual activity to be sure that they actually have consent before proceeding further.
5. Last but not least, hold the perpetrators accountable for a change, no matter how powerful or privileged they happen to be.  That includes enforcing both criminal laws as well as campus conduct policies to the fullest extent of the law.  No more Brock Turners.

As for the idea of colleges trying to influence upward the prices of cheap alcohol at parties (particularly Greek parties) that are typically $5 or so at the door for all-you-can-drink, that would be rather difficult to enforce in practice.  But if the drinking age was lowered to 18, most frats would likely end up having a "going out of business party" since their modern-day speakeasy services would no longer be necessary.  And those that remain would, in practice, throw less frequent parties and/or  ones with less beer (or liquor) to go around if the tax on such beverages is also hiked as well.

As for "Yes Means Yes" laws, there has been quite a bit of confusion, contention, and obfuscation among the chattering classes as to what such laws really are.  To reiterate the difference between different types of rape laws, the following is a good summary:

Force standard (archaic): No Means Yes
Consent standard (current): No Means No
Affirmative consent standard: Yes Means Yes
MacDworkinist standard: Yes Means No

The third item on the list, the affirmative consent standard, is the one that we support. The archaic force standard is problematic for obvious reasons, while "No Means No" is necessary and important but NOT sufficient.   The essential difference between the "No Means No" and "Yes Means Yes" is that in the former, the default answer is "yes", and in the latter, the default answer is "no".  That's it. And the MacDworkinist standard is, to put it mildly, a logistical nightmare at best and a dystopian kettle of fish at worst, not to mention infantilizing and agency-denying to women.  We would never support that.

Doing these things will go a long way towards reducing the rape and sexual assault epidemic in the near term.  Anything less would be uncivilized. So what are we waiting for?

You May Not Like It, But Here's the Answer to (At Least Greatly Reducing) College Rape and Sexual Assault

As we had noted in a previous post four years ago, rape and sexual assault is a persistent epidemic in the USA, including (but not limited to) college campuses nationwide.  Lately, the chattering classes have been endlessly wringing their hands about it for years, but little real progress has been made in recent years, and since the Trump administration began we seem to have even regressed a bit in that regard, the #MeToo movement notwithstanding.

Most rapes and sexual assaults, especially those involving college students on or near campus, are committed by people known to the victim, and many if not most of those involve alcohol to one degree or another, whether by the perpetrator, the victim, or both.  We should first and foremost note that the only thing that actually causes rape is the rapists themselves, period.   While alcohol (among other substances) can indeed fuel it and is often used as a weapon to incapacitate victims, rape would simply not happen without rapists, period.  And the onus should always fall on men not to rape in the first place, instead of falling on women not to "get themselves raped".  The fact that so many people still deny such an obvious truth in 2018 shows just how far we have yet to go towards eliminating or even reducing this epidemic, and those who blame or otherwise put the onus on potential or actual victims are in fact part of the problem.

We seriously need to drain the proverbial swamp of rape culture, yesterday, and thus revoke the rapists' social license to operate.  Culturally, we need to tackle the root causes of sexual violence by rejecting the highly toxic "commodity model" of sexuality and replacing it with the "performance model" (while also avoiding the negative connotations and pitfalls of the word "performance"), and more generally rejecting the "dominator model" of society and replacing it with the "partnership model".  And for alcohol, we need to recognize that while adopting a "Prohibition-Lite" approach of any sort is most likely to backfire and would throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, its link with sexual violence still needs to be dealt with in the meantime as cultural changes can take much time to occur.

So what measures can be taken in the very near term to quickly reduce or at least take the dangerous edge off of this seemingly intractable epidemic?  The reader may or may not like the answer, but here goes:

1. Lower the legal drinking age to 18, yesterday, full stop.  The 21 drinking age makes drinking that much more dangerous than it has to be by forcing it underground, which can put young drinkers in more dangerous situations that increase the risk of sexual assault, and the law itself can be used as a cudgel to silence victims.
2. Raise the tax on alcoholic beverages, both federally as well as at the state and local level (especially in college towns), with extra levies on bulk alcohol such as kegs, cases, and handles. Studies have shown a significant inverse correlation between alcohol prices and rape in general.
3. Legalize cannabis for everyone 18 and older, yesterday.  Cannabis is clearly the safer choice in that regard, as it is highly unlikely to fuel violence or be used as a date-rape drug the way that alcohol all too often is.
4. Pass "Yes Means Yes" laws (aka affirmative consent laws) similar to California's.  If properly written, these laws will essentially eliminate the concept of so-called "gray area rape" by putting the onus on the initiator of sexual activity to be sure that they actually have consent before proceeding further.
5. Last but not least, hold the perpetrators accountable for a change, no matter how powerful or privileged they happen to be.  That includes enforcing both criminal laws as well as campus conduct policies to the fullest extent of the law.  No more Brock Turners.

As for the idea of colleges trying to influence upward the prices of cheap alcohol at parties (particularly Greek parties) that are typically $5 or so at the door for all-you-can-drink, that would be rather difficult to enforce in practice.  But if the drinking age was lowered to 18, most frats would likely end up having a "going out of business party" since their modern-day speakeasy services would no longer be necessary.  And those that remain would, in practice, throw less frequent parties and/or  ones with less beer (or liquor) to go around if the tax on such beverages is also hiked as well.

Doing these things will go a long way towards reducing the rape and sexual assault epidemic in the near term.  Anything less would be uncivilized. So what are we waiting for?

A Simple, Yet Overlooked Solution to College (Town) Drinking Problems

With all of the perennial hand-wringing about binge drinking and related problems on college campuses and in college towns, one would think that actual solutions would have been implemented long ago.  But it appears that not only are the chattering classes NOT naming and defining the actual problem correctly (spoiler alert:  it is NOT peculiar to college students or limited to a specific age group), but they do NOT seem to be interested in solutions that really work.  They just keep on repeating the same tired, old nostrums that are either feel-good pseudo-solutions or worse, neoprohibitionist measures (usually involving propping up the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age) that tend to do more harm than good overall.  Or they jump on the anti-student bandwagon and vilify college students as a group that is somehow unworthy of full adult rights and/or somehow parasitic to the surrounding community.

But there is in fact a very simple solution to reduce such alcohol-related problems, improve town and gown relations, correct for Pigouvian externalities, and raise revenue at the same time:  raise alcohol taxes locally in college towns.  The town of State College, PA, home to my own alma mater, Penn State University, is the latest to float the idea of levying their own local alcohol taxes (though the state would have to grant them permission to do so).  We have known for decades that alcohol taxes work well in general to significantly reduce alcohol-related harms without actually violating anyone's rights, discriminating against students or young people in general, or forcing non-drinkers to foot the bill for the externalities of excessive drinking.  And the state of Pennsylvania (and any other state, for that matter), would do well to grant local governments the right to levy their own alcohol taxes as they see fit, for both on- and off-premise sales.

If the price of alcohol were to go up significantly, even if only modestly, excessive drinking and related consequences (such as traffic casualties, violence, vandalism, overdoses, and public nuisances) would go down, all else being equal.  Moderate drinkers would barely even notice the price difference.  And the revenue it would raise could be used to further reduce (or at least deal with) whatever problems that remain in the community.  A win-win-win situation for everyone but the alcohol industry, basically.

So what are we waiting for?