When we hear that someone succumbed to peer pressure or conformed to group expectations, we are inclined to think about it in negative terms. We imagine a young person smoking his first cigarette or an adult parroting the consensus of her community. We know that these social forces can cause people to act in ways that are harmful to themselves and others; but every day we are discovering more ways that they can be harnessed to solve problems in health, education and other areas. This is crucial.

For decades, development organizations have spent billions of dollars developing medicines, installing wells, or building clinics or schools that people have not fully used, if they have used them at all. Providing the right tools to fix a problem is only part of a solution, and often the easy part. Changing behaviour is much tougher. Consider water. Impure water can cause diarrhoea, which kills 760,000 children under 5 each year. To curb transmission of waterborne diseases, many governments and donors focus on building wells and other water sources, but one big problem is that water is often decontaminated when people transport and store it. There is a relatively simple solution to this problem: chlorine.

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