906 PALUCK AND SHEPHERD e ed tie SR-020 e to ignore rmors about oneself .there was The Effect of Social Interaction Network Ties to Intervention Social Referents ent) Scho wide oms.Prior to the inervention,there were nt for t harassment-relatec ith one exception.The percep Thosocal refernts ocial referents (B0.58.SE0.23.p01).Because we ntion social referents ions examine change scores for each student's ly hig of no of ha mor (B 02.A at the end of the year 0.19.p bserved a significan 9.P school believe it isn mal to start dram or any other kind of rt no =0.13.p the ns of n ding hara it is r al to start ama o trategy interve n that it onnict at the school (B=-0.21.SE= SE 0.20,ns ry:Pre 05 change were no changes in perceived norms concering defense of mpare with thei mprovements across th of pr ctive norms re With respect to collective eke to perce that nd a s nificant decrease in =.01).That likelyto believe tha wing the assembl students we more likely to belie changes in t ceived prescriptive norms tool of han asing st did not c ve changes in percentions of whether more ikely to report these incident believe that some peers deserve to have rumors spread the ere no further shifts in ant social referents with more ties to ir ial re nts from Wa to Wave (B 0.39.SE =0.20.p =.06).Second.we observed furtherWave 1 to Wave 3, we use the number of ties to intervention social referents as measured at Wave 3. This analysis does not introduce bias, as we found no evidence that the intervention changed tie formation or dissolution differentially for the intervention com￾pared with the control social referents.2 The Effect of Social Interaction Network Ties to Intervention Social Referents Schoolwide norms. Prior to the intervention, there were no differences in perceptions of prescriptive or descriptive collective norms based on the number of ties to intervention social referents, with one exception. The perception that it is socially undesirable to ignore rumors was correlated with having more ties to intervention social referents (
0.58, SE
0.23, p
.01). Because we predict that intervention social referents will weaken this perceived norm among their peers, this initial difference biases our future analyses in a conservative direction against inflating our effects. We also controlled for the difference in our analyses. The follow￾ing regressions examine change scores for each student’s percep￾tion of norms from the preassembly survey at Wave 1 to the postassembly survey at Wave 2, and then from Wave 2 to Wave 3 at the end of the year. Prescriptive norms. After the assembly intervention at Wave 2, among students with more ties to intervention social referents, we observed a significant decrease in the perception of a general norm of harassment, namely that students at the school believe it is normal to start drama or any other kind of conflict with other students (
0.27, SE
0.13, p
.04; see Table 2). We also observed a significant decrease in per￾ceptions of norms regarding harassment as a desirable behav￾ioral strategy. Students with more ties to intervention social referents were more likely at Wave 2 to perceive a collective norm that it is acceptable to step back from conflict and not defend your friends (
0.41, SE
0.17, p
.02) and that it is normal to mind your own business (
0.30, SE
0.15, p
.05) compared with their perceptions at Wave 1. There were no changes in perceived norms concerning defense of friends and attempts to stop or ignore harassment. With respect to collective norms regarding a rationale for ha￾rassment, among students with more ties to intervention social referents, we observed an unexpected and a significant decrease in the perception that other students believe that harassment has serious emotional effects (
0.41, SE
0.16, p
.01). That is, following the assembly, students were more likely to believe that other students were insensitive to the effects of harassment. This may reflect their exposure to student testimonials at the assembly about personal experiences of harassment, which often illustrated perpetrators’ insensitivity to the emotional pain of their targets. We did not observe changes in perceptions of whether students believe that some peers deserve to have rumors spread about them. By the end of the year at Wave 3, there were no further shifts in perceived collective norms, with a few exceptions in the predicted direction. First, reversing the pattern from Wave 1 to Wave 2, students with more ties to intervention social referents from Wave 2 to Wave 3 were more likely, as expected, to perceive that students believe that harassment has serious emotional effects (
0.39, SE
0.20, p
.06). Second, we observed further decreases in perceptions of norms regarding harassment as a desirable behavioral strategy, specifically that it is desirable to always defend one’s friends in conflict (
0.38, SE
0.20, p
.06) and that it is undesirable to ignore rumors about oneself (
0.65, SE
0.25, p
.01). Descriptive norms. Across the entire year, there was a signif￾icant increase in the perceived frequency of harassment behavior (descriptive norms of harassment) among all students at the school. Students reported a 20.5% increase in rumors and a 27% increase in forwarding e-mails across the three waves of the survey; the increase at each wave was significant for most harassment-related behaviors (see Table A1 in the Appendix). The number of ties to intervention social referents was un￾related to students’ perceptions of most descriptive norms from Wave 1 to Wave 2. However, descriptive norms reported at the end of the year suggest that students with more ties to inter￾vention social referents were more sensitive to or aware of the rise in harassment. Compared with Wave 1, at Wave 3 students with more ties to intervention social referents perceived a marginally higher rate of harassment via rumor (
0.34, SE
0.19, p
.08), and a significantly higher rate of e-mail forwarding, IMs, and texts (
0.44, SE
0.19, p
.02). At the same time, students with more ties to intervention social referents perceived that more students were ignoring harass￾ment at the end of the year compared with the beginning of the year (
0.43, SE
0.19, p
.02). Close friend norms. Students with more ties to intervention social referents at Wave 3 were less likely to report norms sup￾porting harassment among their close friends at Wave 3 (
0.35, SE
0.16, p
.03). Specifically, they did not perceive that their close friends believe that it is normal to start drama or that conflict is normal (
0.48, SE
0.22, p
.03), or that it is weird to try to stop conflict at the school (
0.21, SE
0.20, ns). Summary: Prescriptive and descriptive norm change. As predicted, among students with more ties to intervention social referent students, we observed significant improvements across the year in their perceptions of prescriptive collective norms regarding harassment. Students with more ties to intervention social referents were less likely to perceive that their peers see conflict as “normal” or consider harassment to be a desirable behavioral strategy. The only inconsistency in the predicted pattern, in which students with more ties to intervention students were less likely to believe that their peers saw the serious emotional effects of harassment, was reversed by the end of the year. All of these changes in perceived prescriptive norms took place against a backdrop of increasing student-reported inci￾dents of harassment. Students with greater ties to intervention students were significantly more likely to report these incidents at the end of the year relative to the start of the year. These findings are consistent with the idea that the behavior of chron￾ically salient and personally relevant social referents can change individuals’ perception of what is typical and acceptable 2 Relative to control social referents, the experimental assignment did not affect treatment students’ social network ties from the first to the last wave in terms of their indegree, or the number of nominations they received:
1.31, SE
1.2, p
.3. See also Table 4A in the Appendix. 906 PALUCK AND SHEPHERD This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.