OBJECTIVE This article provides a review of conceptual and empirical studies on the role of social norms in college student alcohol use and in prevention strategies to counter misuse. The normative influences of various constituencies serving as reference groups for students are examined as possible factors influencing students' drinking behavior. METHOD A review of English language studies w...

Collective intelligence is the ability of a group to perform more effectively than any individual alone. Diversity among group members is a key condition for the emergence of collective intelligence, but maintaining diversity is challenging in the face of social pressure to imitate one's peers. Through an evolutionary game-theoretic model of collective prediction, we investigate the role that i...

We analyse two well-established historic trader scenarios from the area of comparative economics known as the Maghribi Traders Coalition and the contemporary Genoese traders, which contrast the otherwise comparable individualistic Genoese and collective North-African trader societies by the institutions they used to sustain cooperative behaviour. We employ agent-based modelling to test a previo...

Most peer influence research examines socialization between adolescents and their best friends. Yet, adolescents also are influenced by popular peers, perhaps due to misperceptions of social norms. This research examined the extent to which out-group and in-group adolescents misperceive the frequencies of peers' deviant, health risk, and adaptive behaviors in different reputation-based peer cro...

Social norms is a term that has been widely used in different areas of research like sociology, philosophy or multiagent systems. However there is still not a clear definition of what social norms are and the types of problems that they solve. This work presents a general classification and distinction of norms. The type of norms treated in this work are those norms created through the interact...

Many celebrate the Internet’s ability to connect individuals and facilitate collective action toward a common goal. While numerous systems have been designed to support particular aspects of collective action, few systems support participatory, end-to-end collective action in which a crowd or community identifies opportunities, formulates goals, brainstorms ideas and develops plans, mobilizes, ...

The present study examined the impact of socially based descriptive norms on willingness to drink alcohol, drinker prototype favorability, affective alcohol attitudes, and perceived vulnerability for alcohol-related consequences within the Prototype Willingness model. Descriptive norms were manipulated by having 189 young adolescents view experimenter-created profile pages from the social netwo...

College students commonly believe their peers engage in higher levels of dangerous drinking than is actually the case. Social norms marketing campaigns attempt to correct these misperceptions, decrease the perceived normative pressure to drink, and thereby drive down high-risk alcohol consumption. In this case study, we critically examined "Done 4," an unsuccessful social norms marketing campai...