The music downloading phenomenon presents a unique opportunity to examine normative influences on media consumption behavior. Downloaders face moral, legal, and ethical quandaries that can be conceptualized as normative influences within the self-regulatory mechanism of social cognitive theory. The music industry hopes to eliminate illegal file sharing and to divert illegal downloaders to pay s...

The author performed a study among U.S. undergraduates to test an earlier conclusion (D. Trafimow, 1994) that confidence in the correctness of one's perceptions of normative pressure to use a condom influences the correspondence between those perceptions and the intentions actually to perform the behavior. Consistent with previous findings (Trafimow), the participants' perceptions of normative ...

W introduce and test a behavioral model of consumer product search that extends a baseline normative model of sequential search by incorporating nonnormative influences that are local in the sense that they reflect consumers’ undue sensitivity to recently encountered alternatives. We propose two types of such local behavioral influences that, at each stage of a search process, can manifest them...

How do the statements made by people in online political discussions affect other people's willingness to express their own opinions, or argue for them? And how does group interaction ultimately shape individual opinions? We examine carefully whether and how patterns of group discussion shape (a) individuals' expressive behavior within those discussions and (b) changes in personal opinions. Thi...

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and subsequent terrorist acts around the world, have alerted social psychologists to the need to examine the antecedents and consequences of terrorist threat perception. In these two studies, we examined the predictive power of demographic factors (age, gender, location), individual values and normative influences on threat perception and the consequences of this ...

This study evaluated the predictive power of perceived descriptive and injunctive norms on intercollegiate student-athlete alcohol consumption and attitudes toward drinking-related behaviors. The sample consisted of 594 NCAA student-athletes from two geographically opposite sites. Norms variables utilized a school and gender-specific athletic peer reference group. Results indicate that responde...

A “new wave” within psychotherapy has introduced the concept of acceptance into people’s emotional repertoires. Accepting unpleasant emotional states has been demonstrated as an important pathway towards reducing secondary disturbances and improving emotional and psychological functioning. What is often overlooked, however, is whether this move towards acceptance is reinforced within the social...

An agent’s behaviour is governed by multiple factors, including its beliefs/desires/intentions, its reasoning processes and societal influences acting upon it, such as norms. In this paper we propose an extensible argumentation inspired reasoning procedure, and show how it may be used to perform normative reasoning. . The language used by our procedure is built around defeasible, nonmonotonic r...

Firms frequently adopt new information systems (IS). To better understand IS adoption, research has been focused on motives for an IS adoption. In this study, three legitimacy-based motives (coercive, mimetic, and normative pressure) are examined for their impact on two success determinants (i.e., project management approach and team competence) and the subsequent impact of the success determin...

This study examines some of the important organizational consequences of the fashion phenomenon in information technology. An IT fashion is an information technology transitorily collectively believed as new, efficient, and at the forefront of practice. Using data collected from published discourse and annual corporate IT budgets, I have found that companies associated with IT fashions did not ...