Many people try to make society change for the better. The real challenge is how to get good solutions to scale up(按比例放大) for major change. New research suggests that social change may depend on the relationship between beneficial behaviors and policies.
The research, conducted by the University of Maine, University of Vermont and Université Laval in Quebec, Canada, attempted to understand how society can accomplish major, transformative social change, particularly the kind of social change necessary to solve the growing problem of climate change.
The researchers studied a behavior that benefits groups, but does not spread without pol- icy support, such as a costly measure to relieve the effects of climate change. They created a mathematical model, which simulates(模拟) a society where agents live in groups and adopt the beneficial behavior of peers. That behavior, given the right conditions, can spread like viral, but not if the institutional costs are too high.
"Large-scale social change is not just policy or behavior, but the emergence of a new self- reinforcing (自我强化)system that combines both. This allows us to ask new questions, such as 'how would a new pattern of behavior and policy spread?' " says Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, lead author on the study.
The results showed that both behavioral change and policy change are required to achieve large-scale social change-and that they need to happen together. Though neither can get the job done on its own, policy change is especially critical. They found that sometimes the beneficial behavior can spread too far. In some cases, the spread of behavior beyond groups with supporting policy can reduce its perceived success and slow the spread of the policy, thereby limiting beneficial social change overall.
In future research, the team aims to apply these types of models to all sorts of beneficial social change, particularly the challenge of tackling climate change.
