Believability requires video game characters to consider their actions within the context of social norms. Social norms involve a broad range of behavioral defaults, obligations, and injunctions unrelated to strictly causal reasoning. Defeasible reasoning involves rationally compelling but deductively invalid arguments, such as reasoning with rules that allow exceptions. This paper investigates...

The aim of the study was to examine the separate and combined influence of perceived norms, negative reinforcement drinking motives, and social anxiety on alcohol outcomes. Participants (N = 250) completed measures of injunctive norms, social anxiety, drinking motives, alcohol use, and alcohol-related problems. Data collection occurred in 2010. When examined separately, motives emerged as a str...

This study assessed the effects of role models in persuasive messages about risk and social norms to increase motivation to obtain hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccination in men who have sex with men (MSM). MSM at risk for HBV in The Netherlands (N = 168) were recruited online via a range of websites and were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 (risk communication: yes and no) × 2 (s...

Despite the ubiquitous reference to the concept of social norms in the social sciences, there is no consensus about the power of social norms to direct human action. For some, norms have a central and regular influence on human behavior, while for others, the concept is too vague, and the evidence we have about norm compliance is too contradictory to support the claim that they appreciably affe...

Behavioral norms are key ingredients that allow agent coordination where societal laws do not sufficiently constrain agent behaviors. Whereas social laws need to be enforced in a top-down manner, norms evolve in a bottom-up manner and are typically more self-enforcing. While effective norms can significantly enhance performance of individual agents and agent societies, there has been little wor...

Human-Computer interaction may be correlated with social interaction and cultural norms. We examined how Japanese and American people respond to a computer as a social entity and how cultural di erences between Japanese and American behavioral norms in reciprocal social interaction play a role in this response. Reciprocity is the most powerful and universal factor governing social interaction b...

Abstract This paper examines the additive and moderating effects of social influence variables (injunctive norms, descriptive norms, perceived social support) within the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The target behaviour is the decision to eat healthily. Questionnaire responses on components of the TPB, descriptive norms, perceived social support, and subsequent healthy eating were obtai...

Conviviality is a mechanism to reinforce social cohesion and a tool to reduce mis-coordination between individuals, groups and institutions in web communities, for example in digital cities. We use a two-fold definition of conviviality as a condition for social interactions and an instrument for the internal regulation of social systems. In this paper we discuss the use of normative multi-agent...

Fromapublichealthperspective,somesocialnormsare beneficial (eg,washingyourhands),whileothersare less so (eg, shakinghands,whichmay spreadgerms). Social norms can encourage or discourage violence. For example, traditional norms that men have a right to controlwomenand that sexual violence is aprivateaffair increase the likelihoodof intimatepartnerviolence. Social norms that encourage violence ca...