Two studies demonstrated that greater identification with a group was associated with more positive emotions for members who conformed with versus violated the group's norms. These effects were found with injunctive norms, which specify what members should do or what they ideally would do, but emerged less consistently with descriptive norms, which specify what members typically do. Descriptive...

Group behavior is an important feature of conflict scenarios. Often such groups are chaotically organized, but their ideals are sociologically embedded across members such that the group has expected behavior that can represent a major threat. Therefore being able to model the evolution of groups on a generative basis, to anticipate their possible mutation, is valuable. However this is complex ...

Previous research established that norms describing the behaviour of a majority (e.g. 'many people consume too much alcohol') can have ironic and unwanted effects on health behaviour. To date, no research has addressed the effects of minority descriptive norms (e.g. 'only few people use sunscreen'), while such minority norms are frequently communicated to the public. The current studies investi...

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing at the group level: everyone wants to conform when they expect everyone else to conform. There are multiple mechanisms that sustain social norms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in the group, or simply following the lead of others. This article shows how stochastic evolutionary game th...

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...

Three studies examined strategies of status improvement in experimentally created (Study 1 and 2) and preexisting (Study 3) low-status groups. Theory and prior research suggested that an in-group norm that established a particular strategy of status improvement as moral (rather than competent) would have a greater effect on individuals' decision to work at this strategy. Both Study 1 and Study ...

Obesity contributes to 2.8 million deaths annually, making interventions to promote healthy eating critical. Although preliminary research suggests that social norms influence eating behavior, the underlying psychological and neural mechanisms of such conformity remain unexplored. We used fMRI to investigate whether group norms shift individuals' preferences for foods at both behavioral and neu...

Differential association and social learning theory assume delinquent peers to be instigators and reinforcers of delinquent behaviour and norms favourable of delinquency. Control theory, on the other hand, assumes that delinquents will group together with peers that share a common normative and behavioural background. Interactional theory as an integrative paradigm argues that both – influence ...