Many factors influence the perceptions, attitudes and behaviour of actors in co-management, from trust and perceptions of legitimacy to the timing and extent of participation. The chapter introduces and reviews concepts that have less extensively been applied to analyses of the co-management of renewable natural resources. These concepts are personal values, behaviour, social norms, identity and agency. The chapter draws on literature from social psychology and philosophy to identify key characteristics of each concept and identify what has been learnt from application of these concepts to relevant contexts to the co-management of renewable natural resources. The chapter concludes by identifying key and recurring themes, particularly related to the need to understand the social context of co-management, the role of social norms and the links between values, behaviour, identity and agency and the rights and pursuits of justice of Indigenous Peoples and local communities involved in co-management.

The Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework draws attention to the content, quality, and consequences of the production, the institutionalized (community) governance, and the sharing of knowledge. In the domain of corporate governance, the key knowledge in question concerns the rules, mechanisms, and infrastructures that enable corporations to be governed. But how do actors understand what is going on and what is at stake in the field of corporate governance? Drawing on the sociological theory of Strategic Action Fields (SAF), this chapter provides an account of how different imaginaries of corporate status, architecture, governance, and purpose are actively created and promoted by different kinds of disciplinary specialists, standard setters, and practitioners. The chapter shows how the knowledge claims made by these epistemic communities up the 1960s and from the 1970s onwards underpin two competing social norms of corporate governance, which were expressed in different configurations of position, boundary, choice, aggregation, information, payoff, and scope rules.

Chapter 7 examines interventions that can be implemented to address mental illness stigma. These include individual actions that the person who is stigmatized can engage in to help them cope with or resist stigma and actions that other people are obligated to perform in order to decrease stigma they may endorse or perpetuate unwittingly. These also include structural changes that social institutions and systems must undergo to make social structures less stigmatizing and more supportive of people with mental illness, and social and cultural interventions that increase the belongingness and acceptance of people with mental illness into the community as well as transform social norms to be more supportive of people with mental illness. In addition to using philosophical argumentation, this chapter draws on empirical literature in social psychology that examines what works to reduce and resist stigma.

Chapter 4 shows how internalized stigma often results in adaptive preferences that harm a person. When people incorporate aspects of negative stereotypes into their identity, they sometimes develop adaptive preferences by internalizing harmful social norms and beliefs embedded within these stereotypes. I show how people with mental illness often develop goals and desires that are shaped by these beliefs and social norms, which limits what they believe they are capable of, thus reducing their options for action and truncating their agency and autonomy. While adapting desires to one’s circumstances can be positive, as in positive adaptation, it is negative when it is harmful to a person. The adaptive preferences that result from this can be seen as rationality deficits that are oppressive and nonautonomous and that damage well-being and flourishing.

The introduction motivates the book’s arguments by showing how mental illness stigma remains pervasive despite greater awareness of mental health issues and more resources directed at mental health treatment and destigmatization. The forms of mental illness stigma most commonly expressed are stigma against people with severe mental illness who are perceived as homeless, and internalized stigma that people with mental illness project onto themselves. Mental illness stigma arises as a reaction to the violation of social norms of what a human being should be in the Western world in the twenty-first century. I give an account of stigma as the devaluing and discrediting of a person based on possessing a social trait that is seen as violating social norms, constituting a relationship of power. Components of stigma include labeling, stereotyping, prejudice, moral distancing, social exclusion, status loss, dehumanization, microaggressions, discrimination, and epistemic injustice. The chapter ends with a description of the book’s scope, methodology, and chapter outline.

Slowing down and mitigating the impact of climate change necessitates changes to individual behaviour in a multitude of realms. While reducing resource waste in the production process and consuming less are essential, it is also necessary to increase resource reuse with both effective re- and upcycling. However, relatively little is known about the determinants of upcycling behaviour. In this chapter, the literature on the identified psychological and social drivers is reviewed. A broader reading of behavioural determinants for green behaviour change is used to outline possible pathways for behaviour change still untested in a scientific setting in the context of upcycling. The chapter concludes with a critical review on the relative impact of both up- and recycling compared to their perceived effectiveness. Potential ways increase the likelihood of effective reuse while also reducing overall resource use are considered from a social norms perspective.

This chapter is about trust. It is the only chapter in the book that considers the opinions of professionals who had not used machine translation at work. Most of these professionals were prepared to use machine translation if needed. Some were enthusiastic about it. Others had reservations which they would want to see addressed before deciding to use a machine translation tool. These reservations included: (1) concerns about accuracy; (2) concerns about privacy and confidentiality; (3) perceptions of social and professional norms and whether their use of machine translation would be accepted by others; and (4) concerns about how machine translation may lack ‘the human touch’ in sensitive interactions. The chapter examines human communication in relation to the concept of empathy and AI’s ability to mimic it. It ends with a discussion of workplace training by exploring what machine translation users would like to see covered in initiatives aimed at enhancing their trust judgment abilities.

This chapter introduces the LENS model, arguing that linguistic content influences decision-making by eliciting emotions and shaping perceptions of personal and social norms, which then guide strategic choices. It reviews evidence that wording shapes affective reactions and norm perceptions, and that both emotions and norms causally shape behaviour in economic games and moral judgements. The chapter also surveys their interaction: how emotions can generate or reinforce norms and how norm violations evoke emotions. Finally, it motivates a quantitative agenda: measuring emotional and normative content of text (e.g., with large language models) to build language-based utility functions.

Chapter 7 unpacks the forces sustaining societal inertia and explores pathways for transformative change. It introduces the metaphor of the “invisible strangling hand” to describe how systemic structures—emerging from policies, market dynamics, and social norms—trap societies in unsustainable behaviors. The chapter challenges the myth of free will and individual consumer responsibility, arguing that behaviors are deeply shaped by incentives, narratives, and institutional feedbacks. Central to this trap is the role of powerful vested interest parties (VIPs) in shaping perceptions through media, marketing, and policy influence, often masking harmful practices with greenwashing and moral licensing. Counterforces, such as scientists, activists, and journalists (SAWs), seek to challenge these narratives and highlight systemic dysfunctions. The chapter stresses the importance of collective worldview shifts, noting that transformative tipping points often begin at the network’s fringes. Historical examples and cognitive psychology reveal how moral dissonance, groupthink, and self-justification mechanisms sustain harmful norms.