Installations for Civic Culture: Behavioral Policy Interventions to Promote Social Sustainability

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article cover very important issue and address a highly important matter in nowadays environment.  It can be concluded that Authors made the understanding of the topic thhrough a verious of studies - literature studies and own research (well descripted in Reviewers' opinion). The weakness is a lack of the wide description of the limitations of the research and maybe more detailed part of the "future research" directions in the conclusions or in the discussion part.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your helpful review. Please find below our answers and the changes we've introduced to the paper as a result:

Reviewer 1

• Point 1: "The weakness is a lack of the wide description of the limitations of the research and maybe more detailed part of the "future research" directions in the conclusions or in the discussion part."
• Answer and changes: Thank you for your comment. We have addressed this by adding a discussion of weaknesses in section 4 of the paper.

Reviewer 2 Report

Summary:

This paper analyzes two successful behavioral policy interventions. The authors use Installation Theory to understand how the interventions understood and redesigned physical, psychological, and social determinants of behavior in local contexts to produce large-scale behavioral change. The first intervention was that mime artists in Bogota were trained to promote traffic norms among pedestrians and drivers. The mimes encouraged positive collective change by gently mocking rule violators and praising rule compliers. The second intervention is the “Because Nothing Justifies Mistreatment” (BNJM) campaign that significantly reduced domestic violence in Barrancabermeja. It involved a 24-hour hotline to respond to jealousy, actors in the streets, the production of popular songs and other cultural products, and home visits. It also provides citizens with “whistles against abuse” to regulate others.

The authors reviewed the two interventions to showcase how this multiple-layers approach can influence civic behavior and impact social sustainability. Information about the interventions' essential characteristics was collected from various sources, from reports and research publications to news articles and interviews with the campaign designers and participants.

Evaluation:

This paper makes an important contribution by showcasing how a broad approach to promoting behavioral change can be successful. It points to the importance of contextual details, to things like humor, or that campaigns can also ask questions rather than provide new rules or judgment. I learned a lot from reading about the two examples. A couple of comments:

1. The paper is sometimes repetitive: e.g., Installation Theory is partially explained in different places, and it is said multiple times that no experimental evaluation of the behavioral change campaigns happened, but the effects seem strong. The authors should have cut to the chase earlier. The early definitional parts, if needed, can be moved to the discussion section. A general streamlining of the text would help. This is my advice as a reader. I won’t insist on these changes.

2. My main concern is that I interpret the role of Installation Theory (and the other frameworks discussed)  mainly as saying that “behavioral change requires a broad approach, targeting multiple layers of people’s lives.” This is true, and demonstrating it via the traffic/mimes and domestic violence campaign is very valuable. But the frameworks (Installation Theory) do not seem to provide anything beyond that. If they do, this needs to be explained better. For example, the frameworks do not predict which change layers work together particularly well or under which circumstances one is more important than another. So, I’m not sure much discussion of Installation Theory is needed. Why not just say that multiple frameworks highlight the importance of a broad approach to social change? Some policy interventions, like nudging, fail to take such an approach. Here, we discuss two campaigns for large-scale behavioral change that have been successful and which demonstrate how vital a multiple-layers approach is. Stated differently, the paper does not help further develop or evaluate Installation Theory. No conclusions about the usefulness of the framework are derived. It is just used to help us think about what aspects of society to consider when analyzing an intervention. I believe downplaying the role of Installation Theory in the paper will be helpful because then the reader does not expect any significant insights on the theoretical front.

3. The authors should provide a connection to the social norms and institutional change literature in economics. How does Bicchieri (2006, 2016)’s social norms framework fit in? The papers “Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention” (Centola et al. 2018) and “Predicting social tipping in controlled experiments” (Andreoni et al. 2021) highlight the role of coordination for collective behavioral change in an excellent way. This seems very important for the two discussed interventions. Of course, these ideas go back to Mark Granovetter’s and Douglass North’s work on institutional change (he mentions adaptive expectations, network effects/coordination, and other dimensions that need to be altered to see the desired change). A short paragraph on this would connect the paper to a significant and relevant literature stream and thus broaden the readership.

4. A more specific question that I could not find an answer to: Were the red whistles used? How does this work? I cannot imagine a victim of domestic violence blowing the whistle. What was the idea or effect of the whistles in practice?

Author Response

Thank you so much for your helpful review. Please find below our answers and the changes we've introduced to the paper as a result:

Reviewer 2

• Point 1: " The paper is sometimes repetitive: e.g., Installation Theory is partially explained in different places, and it is said multiple times that no experimental evaluation of the behavioral change campaigns happened, but the effects seem strong. The authors should have cut to the chase earlier. The early definitional parts, if needed, can be moved to the discussion section. A general streamlining of the text would help. This is my advice as a reader. I won’t insist on these changes."
• Answer and changes: Thank you for your comment. We have reviewed and edited the whole manuscript to reduce repetitions as much as possible, and tried to find a better balance between a sufficient explanation of the theoretical frameworks that inform our paper and the discussion section.
• Point 2: "My main concern is that I interpret the role of Installation Theory (and the other frameworks discussed) mainly as saying that “behavioral change requires a broad approach, targeting multiple layers of people’s lives.” This is true, and demonstrating it via the traffic/mimes and domestic violence campaign is very valuable. But the frameworks (Installation Theory) do not seem to provide anything beyond that. If they do, this needs to be explained better. For example, the frameworks do not predict which change layers work together particularly well or under which circumstances one is more important than another. So, I’m not sure much discussion of Installation Theory is needed. Why not just say that multiple frameworks highlight the importance of a broad approach to social change? Some policy interventions, like nudging, fail to take such an approach. Here, we discuss two campaigns for large-scale behavioral change that have been successful and which demonstrate how vital a multiple-layers approach is. Stated differently, the paper does not help further develop or evaluate Installation Theory. No conclusions about the usefulness of the framework are derived. It is just used to help us think about what aspects of society to consider when analyzing an intervention. I believe downplaying the role of Installation Theory in the paper will be helpful because then the reader does not expect any significant insights on the theoretical front".
• Answer and changes: Thank you for your comment. We do believe that the Installation Theory framework does provide a lot more than the focus on multiple layers, especially: a focus on activity at its point of enactment (rather than abstract belief or attitude change, for example, and how that links to broader social reproduction processes), a detailed conceptualization of the main types of factors and how the mutually interact to support and determine behavior (the three layers, in which the point is not that one or the other might be more important, but rather that they work and should be redesigned together for sustainable effects following local dynamics), and finally a practicable framework for the analysis and redesign of local installations. We see the paper as an illustration of those advantages - rather than a contribution to the theoretical front. Because of this, rather than downplaying the role of Installation Theory, we have introduced a few explanations in different sections (especially 1.1.2 and the discussion) to make this clearer.
• Point 3: "The authors should provide a connection to the social norms and institutional change literature in economics. How does Bicchieri (2006, 2016)’s social norms framework fit in? The papers “Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention” (Centola et al. 2018) and “Predicting social tipping in controlled experiments” (Andreoni et al. 2021) highlight the role of coordination for collective behavioral change in an excellent way. This seems very important for the two discussed interventions. Of course, these ideas go back to Mark Granovetter’s and Douglass North’s work on institutional change (he mentions adaptive expectations, network effects/coordination, and other dimensions that need to be altered to see the desired change). A short paragraph on this would connect the paper to a significant and relevant literature stream and thus broaden the readership.
• Answer and changes: Thank you for your comment. To address this, we have added some references regarding the role of coordination for collective behavioral change.
• Nevertheless, we have decided not to integrate these frameworks in a more detailed / comprehensive way at this stage. While we see their relevance and their potential to understand the cases in point and a particular aspect of the framework presented (especially around the social layer), our focus in this paper goes in a different direction. Specifically, it is rather directed towards the argument developed in the answer to the previous comment (2) about how the Installation Theory framework provides a systemic perspective on local behavioral determinants and change (rather than on the dynamics of norm, network, or institutional change).

• Point 4: "A more specific question that I could not find an answer to: Were the red whistles used? How does this work? I cannot imagine a victim of domestic violence blowing the whistle. What was the idea or effect of the whistles in practice?"
• Answer and changes: Thank you, we have included a few more details about this just before the end of section 1. Basically, whistles were used by both witnesses and potential victims when they feared an aggression was about to take place. It was a way to call for help and to communicate others who were watching to hopefully stop a dangerous situation before it turned into an aggression. It worked both for victims to ask for help, and for people watching to call attention to the situation and try to prevent/stop it.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper "Installations for civic culture: behavioral policy interventions to promote social sustainability in Colombia" examines two complex behavioral policy interventions to illustrate how Installation Theory can provide a framework to systematically analyze and design for large-scale behavioral change to support social sustainability.  The research topic is meaningful. The research method in this paper is appropriate, the source of data is clear, and the analysis is more specific. A few revisions are proposed for the author's reference:

1 The author did not write enough in the first paragraph. As an international article, the author needs to stand on an international perspective and draw out the research of this article.

2 The analysis of the quantitative part lacks theoretical support and theoretical depth and needs to be revised.

3 The discussion section, explaining the marginal contribution and research limitations of this article.

4 If the paper can be analyzed with related factual cases in conjunction with the theoretical framework proposed in this article, it will make the article more convincing.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your helpful review. Please find below our answers and the changes we've introduced to the paper as a result:

• Point 1: "The author did not write enough in the first paragraph. As an international article, the author needs to stand on an international perspective and draw out the research of this article."
• Answer and changes: Thank you for your comment. We have added a few elements in the first paragraph. While our paper is based on cases in Colombia, the first paragraph (and the rest of the paper) discuss a challenge that is common to the global practice of behavioural science.

• Point 2: "The analysis of the quantitative part lacks theoretical support and theoretical depth and needs to be revised."
• Answer and changes: We’re sorry, but we are not entirely sure what this comment is referring to. Our paper doesn’t include a quantitative analysis, it is entirely qualitative.
• Following another reviewer’s comment, we have provided a little more detail on the quantitative results of the interventions. But to be clear, those were not done by us: they are public data on city-wide indicators collected by the local governments.

• Point 3: "The discussion section, explaining the marginal contribution and research limitations of this article."
• Answer and changes: Thank you for your comment. We have addressed this by adding a discussion of weaknesses in section 4 of the paper.

• Point 4: " If the paper can be analyzed with related factual cases in conjunction with the theoretical framework proposed in this article, it will make the article more convincing."
• Answer and changes: Thank you for your comment. While we do agree that a wider range of cases could enlarge the evidence in support of our framework, we don’t think it’s practicable to do this without undertaking considerable data collection activities comparable to those we conducted for the two interventions we already included. We also fear that at this stage of our project, introducing more cases could obscure our message. We rather see that as a natural continuation of our project: we are posing the first lines with these two relevant, robust, and complex experiences in this paper, and in subsequent ones we will continue refining and developing our initial framework.
• Nevertheless, to partially remedy that we have included some references to two other interventions that were designed with the Installation Theory framework in mind and that yielded good results.