BACKGROUND Hospital environmental service workers (ESWs) play an important role in interrupting the chain of infection because the environment is a reservoir for nosocomial pathogens. Improving ESWs' knowledge through education has been shown to improve ESW cleaning, but the behavioral determinants of their work have not been studied. Understanding and targeting ESWs' attitudes and beliefs may ...

What is considered to be fair depends on context-dependent expectations. Using a modified version of the Ultimatum Game, we demonstrate that both fair behavior and perceptions of fairness depend upon beliefs about what one ought to do in a situation— that is, upon normative expectations. We manipulate such expectations by creating informational asymmetries about the offer choices available to t...

Family, peers and other environmental factors are likely to influence children's dietary behavior but few measures of these phenomena exist. Questionnaires to measure family and peer influences on children's fruit, juice and vegetable (FJV) consumption were developed and pilot tested with an ethnically diverse group of Grade 4-6 children. Principal components analyses revealed subscales with ac...

Doping use is an ongoing problem in contemporary sports. Despite efforts to detect and control doping, research on its etiology is limited, especially among elite-level athletes. The present study used an integrated social cognition model to examine the predictors of doping intentions. Structured anonymous questionnaires were completed by 1075 Greek adult elite-level athletes (M age = 25 years,...

We investigated critical beliefs to target in interventions aimed at improving sun-protective behaviours of Australian adults, a population at risk for skin cancer. Participants (N = 816) completed a Theory of Planned Behaviour belief-based questionnaire and a 1-week follow-up of sun-protective behaviour. A range of behavioural, normative and control beliefs correlated with sun-protective behav...

Why are you reading this abstract? In some sense, your answer will cast the exercise as valuable-but what is value? In what follows, we suggest that value is evidence or, more exactly, log Bayesian evidence. This implies that a sufficient explanation for valuable behavior is the accumulation of evidence for internal models of our world. This contrasts with normative models of optimal control an...

Two studies investigated the role of beliefs about the acceptability of aggression ("normative beliefs") against Jews in determining who would join an extremist group. In Study 1, students in a university in Pakistan (N=144) completed self-report attitude measures, and were subsequently approached by a confederate who asked whether they wanted to join an extremist anti-Semitic organization. Nor...

the evil demon. In that case, there would not be an essential connection between our sensory experiences and the truth. Therefore, if anything like a ‘primitively rational way of forming beliefs’ is at stake in acquiring normative beliefs, a similar worry might arise regarding whatever that way is thought to be. In particular, since Wedgwood claims that way is a form of normative intuition, exe...

The rationale for collaborative environmental management often hinges on two factors: first that specialized training creates biased analytics requiring multi-disciplinary approaches to solve policy problems; and second, that the normative beliefs of competing actors must be included in policymaking to give the process legitimacy and to decide trans-scientific problems. We test these two factor...