- 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.
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?
Apologists for the oppression of young people and oppressors, themselves, of young people are standing in the way of implementing effective Social Norms Marketing. Those people believe that oppression is the answer to progress when it is not, in fact, not the answer. Social Norms Marketing woul work at it's best if the drinking age was 18. The current drinking age of 21 does not allow for effective Social Norms Marketing.
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