Shaon Lahiri
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Shaon Lahiri is an Assistant Professor of Public Health in the School of Health Sciences at the College of Charleston. He is a social and behavioral scientist within the field of public health, and focuses on understanding and developing approaches to change population behavior toward better health outcomes. His research has focused on identifying and leveraging the underlying mechanisms of behavior change, with a specific focus on how to measure and change social norms that support harmful behaviors such as tobacco use, intimate partner violence, not using contraception, and constraining healthcare access for stigmatized groups. His current work focuses on understanding how stigma constrains health outcomes for transgender and non-binary individuals, as well as for cheerleaders in the US.
Shaon Lahiri joins the Paris IAS in december 2025 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Social norms; tobacco use; contraception use; stigma; psychological reactance.
A Bridge over Troubled Water: Toward More Contextual and Effective Behavior Change
Nudge interventions are changes made to our choices that encourage us to do things in a particular way without forbidding our ability to make different choices. For instance, if a state makes organ donation the default choice when individuals receive a driver’s license, this encourages a higher rate of organ donors without forbidding an individual’s decision to opt out of such a program. These types of interventions have been known to focus on changing individual-level behavior (known as the “i-frame”), while critics suggest that a better approach is to focus on changing system-level behaviors (known as the “s-frame”). This research project will argue that this is a false dichotomy, and that both approaches have their place in contextual behavior change interventions to tackle complex societal problems.
This work bridges the i-frame with the s-frame by first showing how this has already been done for some time in fields such as public health and public policy, drawing on a number of theoretical frameworks that have been successfully applied in complex real-world settings. This is bolstered by a systematic review of reviews of behavior change intervention literature to show how such bridge interventions have been applied in different settings and domains in order to extract the key features of such bridge interventions. Finally, the project also demonstrates how AI tools can be used to assist in the development of such bridge interventions.
Key publications
Shaon Lahiri, Jeffrey B. Bingenheimer, W. Douglas Evans, Yan Wang, Ben Cislaghi, Priyanka Dubey, Bobbu Snowden. "Understanding the mechanisms of change in social norms around tobacco use: A systematic review and meta‐analysis of interventions". Addiction, 120(2), 215-235, 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/add.16685
Shaon Lahiri. "Resisting Harmful Social Norms Change Using Social Inoculation". Current Opinion in Psychology, 101914, 2024.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2024.101914
Shaon Lahiri, Jeffrey B. Bingenheimer, Erica Sedlander, Wolfgang Munar, Rajiv Rimal. "The role of social norms on adolescent family planning in rural Kilifi county, Kenya". PloS One, 18(2), e0275824, 2023.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275824
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