Lay conceptions of personality change and continuity were examined in a sample of 112 undergraduates. Participants rated their personal change over 5 years (past or future), the change they perceived to be normative over 10-year age spans between 15 and 65, their beliefs about whether personality is fixed or malleable (‘‘lay theories’’) and their beliefs about the causes of personality change a...

We investigated the key beliefs to target in interventions aimed at increasing physical activity (PA) among mothers and fathers of young children. Parents (288 mothers and 292 fathers) completed a Theory of Planned Behaviour belief-based questionnaire and a 1-week follow-up of PA behaviour. We found that a range of behavioural, normative, and control beliefs were significantly correlated with p...

In this paper we introduce an ontology based on the notion of agent to represent and reason about social reality. We model social constructions as agents, for example, groups, organizations, normative systems, and roles, and we attribute mental attitudes to them. Roughly, we define obligations or regulative norms as goals of the normative system, constitutive norms as beliefs of the normative s...

The study of norms (Ns) is recent but growing concern in the AI field (cf. [MOS92]; [SHO92]) as well within other formal approaches to social action, such as Game Theory (where theories of Ns began to appear long before, cf.[LEW69]; [ULL77]). The normative is an essential dimension of social life. An explicit model of such dimension is crucial for any theory of social action. Notions such as "s...

I argue that certain species of belief, such as mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, are insulated from a form of Harmanstyle debunking argument whereas moral beliefs, the primary target of such arguments, are not. Harman-style arguments have been misunderstood as attempts to directly undermine our moral beliefs. They are rather best given as burden-shifting arguments, concluding that ...

According to the theory of planned behavior, human action is guided by three kinds of considerations: beliefs about the likely outcomes of the behavior and the evaluations of these outcomes (behavioral beliefs), beliefs about the normative expectations of others and motivation to comply with these expectations (normative beliefs), and beliefs about the presence of factors that may facilitate or...