The Big Impact of Small Groups on College Drinking

Abstract

College drinking is a problem with severe academic, health, and safety consequences. The underlying social processes that lead to increased drinking activity are not well understood. Social Norms Theory is an approach to analysis and intervention based on the notion that students’ misperceptions about the drinking culture on campus lead to increases in alcohol use. In this paper we develop an agent-based simulation model, implemented in MATLAB, to examine college drinking. Students’ drinking behaviors are governed by their identity (and how others perceive it) as well as peer influences, as they interact in small groups over the course of a drinking event. Our simulation results provide some insight into the potential effectiveness of interventions such as social norms marketing campaigns.

Reconstructing Demography and Social Behavior During the Neolithic Expansion from Genomic Diversity Across Island Southeast Asia

“…With agent-based models, no global outcomes are programmed into the model, and broad-scale patterns instead emerge as the result of local interactions and decisions made by individual agents. Agent-based models are particularly useful because they provide near unlimited flexibility in model design, albeit at the price of strong constraints on implementation and statistical inference (Lee et al 2015). Indeed, the individual-based models used in human population genetics have typically explored general theoretical expectations, rather than explicitly inferring model parameters by statistical fitting to genetic data.…”

A Study On The Validation Of The Drinking And Abstaining Behaviors Questionnaire Among Portuguese University Students

“…Alcohol consumption is influenced by a variety of cultural norms, which are defined by beliefs, attitudes and behaviors (Grønkjaer, Curtis, De Crespigny, & Delmar, 2011). Also, the individual's perception of their social environment, as well as the cultural norms, the influence of students' peers (Fitzpatrick, Martinez, Polidan, & Angelis, 2015;Merrill, Carey, Reid, & Carey, 2014;Pedersen, LaBrie, & Lac, 2008), their need for social approval (Rimal & Mollen, 2013) and their consumption intention (Park, Klein, Smith, & Martell, 2009) may influence alcohol consumption. These effects could explain the association observed between DB (Acquaintances and Good friends) with enhancement, coping, conformity and social drinking motives.…”

On the Effectiveness of Social Norms Intervention in College Drinking: The Roles of Identity Verification and Peer Influence

“…Our model was developed in the MATLAB programming environment to simulate individual student drinking and group interactions at a college party over a fixed time period (Fitzpatrick et al., ). Previous models (Garrison and Babcock, ; Gorman et al., ) consider a much simpler event structure, focusing instead on the longer term evolution of the population with respect to drinking.…”