[MUSIC] Note the change in personal normative beliefs is not strictly necessary to abandon a social norm. One may still be convinced that marriage would be the best option for young girls, but the social and economic constraints have changed. Now, one observes that most girls get an education, find jobs, and even husbands. So empirical expectation have changed, as well as factual beliefs. As I mentioned, it has been found that giving villagers information about the availability of job for girls with high school degrees, and how to get these jobs led teenage girls to stay in school longer. It was also found that parents' discovery of new economic prospects for girls led them to invest more in their daughter's education. In these cases, some parents may still cling to the personal normative belief that early marriage is best for girl's happiness. But since the world has changed, and now an educated girls can find a suitable husband, they will conform and embrace education. >> India is changing rapidly. And if parents can afford to send their daughter to secondary school, the girl would be protected from getting married young. It is all a question of which alternatives to child marriage exist for a girl. Girls who have few alternatives are much more likely to marry young than girls who have alternatives to marriage. Child marriage largely comes down to educational and economic opportunities >> As I told you, the child marriage is actually in certain groups in non-developed kind of areas. If you asked a question from people in Colombo, in the cities, for them actually, education is a priority. Even if the child is having sex, they will not want to stop education just because there is a sexual relationship. For them, it is worse to break up your studies than to get married. So, therefore, they will react like that. Whereas, in other communities actually, they don't think like that. >> The issue of opportunities which can help to cut child marriage. School, education is one of the key interventions which can reduce the number of children who can go into child marriage. The opportunities for educations are increasing. Recently, the government has passed a policy which will extend the primary education from 7 years to 11 years. This will be a compulsory requirement for all children who are starting primarily school to stay in school until 11 year. >> There is a certain sluggishness in personal normative beliefs of the moral kind as opposed to simply prudential ones. In the last lectures, I highlighted the importance of changing personal beliefs, be they factual or normative. It should be understood that a personal normative belief may include prudent as well as moral consideration. A change in personal normative beliefs does not necessarily entail a change in one's moral consideration. It may instead just entail a change in one's prudential assessment. When measuring personal normative beliefs, we should be able to distinguish the prudent from the moral, since the first is much more easily changed. For example, if a mother gets convinced that a colostrum is good for the baby, she will also come to believe that she should give it to the newborn. Whether she does it or not will depend on other factors, for example, the ideas of her mother-in-law. But at least, she will have some reasons to immediately nurse her newborn. There are several conditions that may help or impair factual or personal normative belief change. One condition for successful belief change is that people are aware of their beliefs. Another potential stumbling block is that the new information that we provide may be inconsistent with the beliefs that people already hold. A further problem is that we're generally biased toward information that confirms our beliefs, and thus tend to interpret or reject new information that is inconsistent with our worldview. Let us now consider each of these problems in turn. Think of how important awareness is. We often wrongly assume that individual beliefs are at the forefront of the conscientiousness. Most of the time, they are not. Beliefs exist and they can be referenced upon demand. But the majority of the time, they stay dormant, exerting unconscious influence on our behavior, up until the point when their validity is challenged. A father may not immediately recognize that sending his daughter to school has implications for her honor and purity, for example. To change norms, people have to become aware of and consciously evaluate their factual and personal normative beliefs, as well as the social expectation that supports a norm. It is often argued that legislative intervention, educational media campaign, or even intensive verbal group communication are necessary tools to promote social change. One reason why they could be extremely useful is precisely that they make people aware of their beliefs and expectations, as well as the beliefs and expectation of others. I will return to this very important point later.
