This workshop at Purdue University draws together a global group of interdisciplinary scholars who, together with Purdue faculty, offer analyses of a series of pressing global challenges. The workshop focuses on finding new perspectives on seemingly "intractable" global policy problems by examining a cutting edge area of research in the social sciences: the role of social norms, considered as a kind of informal institution, in shaping policy design, adoption, and implementation. The workshop aims to apply these theoretical insights on multipe difficult problems that have faced policy makers internationally. The workshop involves a series of substantive issue panels focusing on the actual and/or potential role of informal institutions in offering solutions. It also includes an intergrative, cross-issue panel drawing out broader lessons about informal institutions as they relate to multiple diverse issues. The presentations and broader conclusions of this work will be disseminated in both scholarly and non-scholarly outlets.
With regards to intellectual merit, informal institutions (or norms) are increasingly recognized as vital determinants of human behavior in multiple contexts and disciplines. Where simpler models of rationality once dominated our understanding of human behavior, more complicated models emphasizing the influence of norms are now recognized as playing a critical, but poorly understood role. While much progress has been made in the past decade in studying these informal institutions in multiple disciplines and as they operate in many different contexts, the intellectual challenges of understanding the impact of these norms remain daunting and the integration of this work remains limited. By convening this interdisciplinary, cross-national group of scholars, the organizers aim to contribute to the understanding of solutions to policy challenges as well as to advance theoretical understanding of the ways that informal institutions and social norms affect global problems.
With regards to broader impacts, the workshop will offer new solutions to serious problems, promote the professional and intellectual development of graduate students working on vital scientific questions that affect serious policy problems, and build international, interdisciplinary networks and partnerships that include scholars and students from underrepresented gender, racial, and geographic groups.
NSF funds helped support a two day international workshop at Purdue University, with more than a dozen scholars from a variety of fields coming together for wide-ranging discussions about identifying fresh solutions to seemingly intractable problems, including climate change, food security, and women’s human rights. Participants came from multiple disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and political science, and included practitioners as well as academics. The workshop also provided opportunities for graduate students to interact with the scholars both in formal sessions and at meals and less formal settings. By allowing a diverse community of experts to interact in this manner, the workshop specifically sought to generate new and innovative ideas to address these pressing global problems. Although scholars came from a wide range of disciplines, they all shared a focus on the importance of "norms," or the unwritten rules of appropriate behavior, in thinking about these problems. By describing different understandings of how norms shape individual and group behavior and choices, presenters helped generate new perspectives on how a focus on norms might generate progress on these serious challenges facing the world. Specific ideas included the promotion of new norms related to hunger or violence against women to make policy reform more likely, as well as describing challenges in terms of alternative norms of fairness or responsibility to act for problems like climate change. Public outreach was a major goal of the workshop. The workshop was webcast and the proceedings remain available to the public on the conference website (www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/intractableproblems/). A subset of the symposium papers have since been published as a special mini-symposium in the academic journal Political Research Quarterly. Finally, workshop organizers also produced four issue briefs prepared for the public and decision-makers, based on the presentations at the workshop, that are also available on the project website.
