Social norms have been shown to impact behaviors, but with mixed results. The theory of normative social behavior delineates factors that moderate the relationship between descriptive norms and behaviors, and it addresses the attributes of behaviors that make them susceptible to normative influence. This study tests whether group orientation moderates the impact of descriptive norms on water co...

Psychologists practicing in Canada must decide which set of normative data to use for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV). The purpose of this study was to compare the interpretive effects of applying American versus Canadian normative systems in a sample of 432 Canadian postsecondary-level students who were administered the WAIS-IV as part of an evaluation for a lear...

This article gives an overview of a normative computational theory of visual receptive fields, by which idealized shapes of early spatial, spatio-chromatic and spatiotemporal receptive fields can be derived in an axiomatic way based on structural properties of the environment in combination with assumptions about the internal structure of a vision system to guarantee consistent handling of imag...

Over the past 10 years, urban regime theory has become the dominant paradigm for studying urban politics in liberal democracies. Yet there is disagreement about how far it can help us to understand urban political processes. This article argues that regime theory is best understood as a theory of structuring with limits in its analysis of the market economy. These limits undermine its ability t...

Racism is a problem with many facets, and a strategy of divide and conquer is useful in making the problem more tractable. One facet, which is also a core question of contemporary social morality, concerns how we ought to handle racial categorization, by which we mean, for instance, thinking of a person as black, Korean, Latino, white, etc. While it is widely agreed that racial categorization p...

Normative Systems: Semantics and Proof Theory Silvano Colombo Tosatto SnT, University of Luxembourg Luxembourg Guido Boella University of Turin Italy Leendert van der Torre University of Luxembourg Luxembourg Serena Villata INRIA France

Traditional economic decision theory proposes that people behave in certain ways when faced with a well-formulated set of alternatives and information. It is a normative theory; it suggests that people should act according to certain decision rules, but not that they will necessarily do so in reality. The standard assumption is that a person has a utility function over all possible outcomes, wh...

We explored the effects on intrinsic motivation and ego-involved persistence of winning versus losing a competitively contingent reward and, for losers, the additional effects of receiving either positive performance feedback or performancecontingent rewards. Winners were more intrinsically motivated than losers. Losers given an explicit normative standard who received positive feedback for mee...