Using Game Theory to assess the effects of social norms and social networks on adolescent smoking in schools: a proof of concept study

This proof of concept study will harness novel transdisciplinary insights to contrast two school-based smoking prevention interventions among adolescents in the UK and Colombia, where smoking rates and norms are different, in order to better understand social norms-based mechanisms of action. We aim: to improve the measurement of social norms of smoking behaviours in adolescents and how they spread in schools; to better characterise the mechanisms of action of smoking prevention interventions in schools, learning lessons for future intervention research. One intervention is designed to harness peer influence, the other is based on classroom pedagogy. In a before and after design, we will obtain psychosocial, friendship and behavioural data (e.g. attitudes and intentions towards smoking and vaping) from 300 students from 3 schools for each intervention in the UK and the same number in Colombia. Pre-intervention, participants will take part in a Rule Following Game, and in Coordination and Double Dictator Games that allow us to assess their judgments about the social appropriateness of a range of smoking-related behaviours, and the estimation of individual sensitivity to social norms. After the interventions, these behavioural economic experiments will be repeated, so we can estimate how social norms (related to smoking) have changed, how sensitivity to classroom and year group norms have changed and how individual changes are related to changes among friends. We will use Game Theory approaches to extract norms and norms sensitivity parameters from the experiments, examining the influence of individual student attributes and their social networks within a Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework. Putative mechanisms will be inferred by triangulating our experiments with qualitative data from participants, by having data that contrasts the effects of two interventions with putatively different mechanisms, and by the contrast between two countries where norms are different.