This presentation will discuss the consequences of powerful actors’ efforts to diffuse specific cultural scripts around the world hinges on how people interpret those scripts. The influence of human rights campaigns to combat men’s violence toward women, in particular, rests on people’s perceptions of individual rights and consent versus relationship duties. Using administrative and historical data sources unique to Malawi, Swindle construct measures of people’s likely exposure to such campaigns via nearby aid projects, education curricula reforms, and mass media programming, which he paired with national surveys. He observed that people’s exposure to campaigns circulating consent-focused scripts is associated with substantial increases in their stated rejection of men’s physical violence toward their partner and support for women’s ability to refuse sex. However, he discovered that exposure to campaigns that reinforce duty-focused scripts is mostly negatively associated with such moral declarations, contributing to tolerance of men’s sexual control, as declining to have sex with one’s partner is cast as a form of abuse. How actors interpret cultural scripts, including scripts condemning abuse, is highly consequential in processes of global cultural diffusion, and it can help explain why some social interventions have unexpected consequences.

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