The #MeToo movement has brought a reckoning to some of the most powerful men on earth, from politicians and movie magnates in the United States to business titans and Bollywood legends in India. The latest example was the former Costa Rican president Óscar Arias Sánchez, a Nobel laureate who was accused last week of sexual misconduct by multiple women.

Yet the movement has had little effect on the broader problem of sexual abuse, harassment and violence by men who are neither famous nor particularly powerful.

A partial explanation may lie, according to Sarah Khan, a Yale University political scientist, in a concept social scientists call “common knowledge”: the idea that systemic change is shaped as much or more by people’s perceptions of others’ beliefs and values as it is by their own.

That means that reducing sexual misconduct presents a kind of coordination problem. You need to not only change people’s views of the problem, you also need to show them that other people’s views have changed the same way.