Men and women living in randomly selected 1st-year dormitories participated in tailored single-sex sexual assault prevention or risk-reduction programs, respectively. An evaluation of the men's project is presented (N = 635). The program incorporated social norms and bystander intervention education and had an impact on self-reported sexual aggression and an effect on men's perceptions that the...

Introduction: The basis of Social Norms Theory is that behavior is infl uenced by the perception of peer behavior. This implies that an overestimation (misperception) of substance use by peers would lead to an increase in personal substance use. It is hypothesized that the misperception of substance use by peers is negatively associated with health and academic performance, and that this associ...

In multi-agent systems, norms are used to regulate agents’ behavior so that the objectives of the systems can be realized in a predictable way. Therefore, it is important to check whether agents can comply with the norms imposed on them. However, when norms are interrelated, verification of norm compliance cannot be achieved by checking compliance of each norm separately as done traditionally. ...

The social norms approach to college drinking suggests that students misperceive the drinking behavior and attitudes of their peers. While much is known about these misperceptions, research is sparse regarding the context in which perceived and actual norms are assessed. As social influence is pronounced in college, the principles of Social Impact Theory may contribute to differences between as...

Social norms can be oppressive or empowering; and so can laws. Norms are sometimes described as emergent rules or behavioural regularities that arise as solutions to collective action problems of various kinds faced by individuals when they interact with each other. Examples include rules of combat, courtship rituals, and informal systems of property rights that determine what members of a grou...

A substantial amount of research has suggested that adolescents' attitudes and behaviors are influenced by peers; however, little is known regarding adolescents' individual variability, or susceptibility, to peer influence. In this study, a performance-based index from an experimental paradigm was used to directly measure adolescents' susceptibility to peers. A total of 36 adolescent boys parti...

This paper examines the role that social capital plays in organisations in creating alignment between the business and IT communities. The paper reports on an interpretative study in financial services looking at the impact that network associations, social norms, trust, reciprocity-expectation and collective efficacy have on alignment within four firms. The study found that firms with high lev...

The fact that selfish behavior may not achieve full efficiency at the collective level has been well also known in the literature. Therefore we need to cope with the socio-economic system by attempting to stack the deck in such a way that individuals with selfish incentives have to do what is the desirable thing. Of particular interests is the question how social interactions can be restructure...

Introduction: Misperceptions of peer drinking norms are widely documented in the US student populations and are associated with increased personal consumption. Few studies have examined misperceptions of peer gambling, and none of these have been conducted among adolescents in the European context. In a national sample, we examined misperceptions of peer gambling in Finland. Tenets of the socia...

BACKGROUND Substance use among youth is a worldwide epidemic that impacts negatively on the health sector as well as the family and society. Early student life is a time of tremendously high motivation to conform to the behaviours, values, and attitudes that are valued by the youth culture. They observe their peers' behavior and alter their own behaviour with their peers' norms and expectations...