A Social Judgment Theory Approach to Conducting Formative Research in a Social Norms Campaign

Abstract

The social norms approach predicts that campaign messages providing true normative information about widely misperceived health behaviors will reduce the gap between distorted perceptions versus actual practices and consequently reduce behaviors based on exaggerated norms. Formative evaluation of messages designed to effectively convey true norms informed by social judgment theory (SJT) should measure the boundaries of the latitudes of acceptance, noncommitment, and rejection for normative information. This study found that these latitudes were significantly different from one another in believability. SJT predicts that a campaign based on a norm falling in the latitude of noncommitment will be likely to be effective. A series of messages using the true norm, which fell within the latitude of noncommitment, were part of a campaign. The gap in perceived versus actual drinking and the difference in perceived number of drinks was reduced, while self-reports of consumption of five or fewer drinks increased significantly.Social norms campaigns have been conducted on many college campuses to combat extreme drinking, drug use, smoking, and other risky and harmful behaviors by means of communicating the healthy attitudes and behaviors to the majority of students. The focus of the campaign described here was to reduce high-risk consumption of alcohol. This is important because extreme alcohol use is a serious problem on college campuses, often resulting in negative outcomes such as physical injury to self and others, academic harm, engaging in risky sexual behavior, interpersonal and family conflict, and impaired driving and accidents, among others

Distinctiveness and Influence of Subjective Norms, Personal Descriptive and Injunctive Norms, and Societal Descriptive and Injunctive Norms on Behavioral Intent: A Case of Two Behaviors Critical to Organ Donation

“…The findings here show that using the TPB and the SNA in concert in order to predict intention to engage in health behaviors was an important step in predicting intent to behave for two different behaviors critical to organ donation. Similar to Smith, Atkin, Martell, Allen, and Hembroff (2006) who coupled the SNA with social judgment theory in formative research on strategies to reduce drinking on college campuses, the current findings show clearly that using the TPB and the SNA together is more powerful than using each alone in organ donation research.…”

The Ability of Narrative Communication to Address Health-related Social Norms

“…First, the information that interventions present about social norms must be believable: interventions have failed because the target audience did not believe the intervention's claims (Smith, Atkin, Martell, Allen and Hembroff, 2006). Second, the reference group used in the intervention must be the appropriate group for a given behavior.…”

Testing the Effects of Social Norms and Behavioral Privacy on Hand Washing: A Field Experiment

“…Wechsler, Seibring, Liu, and Ahl (2004) reported that social norms campaigns had been adopted by nearly half of all colleges and universities in the United States to promote healthy and prosocial behaviors across campuses, primarily in efforts to reduce excessive drinking. These studies generally predict main effects for normative information on behavior with mixed results; some indicating a substantial link between social norms and behavior (e.g., Atkin, Martell, Smith, & Greenamyer, 2004; Bator & Cialdini, 2000; Smith, Atkin, Martell, Allen, & Hembroff, 2006), others reporting no impact on attitudes (e.g., Bagozzi, Wong, Abe, & Bergami, 2000; Kallgren, Reno, & Cialdini, 2000) or behavior change in the opposite of the predicted direction (Campo & Cameron, 2006; Wechsler et al, 2003).…”