Understanding Change in Social-Movement Participation: The Roles of Social Norms and Group Efficacy

Across the globe, collective action has been a notable driver of social change. Previous research has identified numerous psychological antecedents of collective action participation, such as group efficacy. The mobilizing influence of social norms, however, has been comparatively neglected. Among a nationally representative Chilean sample (N = 3328), a three-wave longitudinal study tested the relationship between the perceived frequency of family and friends' participation in social movements (norms of close social networks) and change in the frequency of participants' own engagement over time. Perceived efficacy of social movements to facilitate social change was tested as a mediator of this relationship. A fully constrained bidirectional cross-lagged panel model revealed that norms of close social networks significantly predicted social-movement participation over time. This longitudinal relationship was also significantly mediated by group efficacy. Direct reverse paths were also observed, with social-movement participation predicting norms of close social networks over time. Considering low degrees of political participation often seen in societies, these results suggest that utilizing the normative context to promote participation in social movements may prove fruitful in mobilizing the drive for social change.     

Threatened by the unexpected: physiological responses during social interactions with expectancy-violating partners

Individuals who violate expectations increase uncertainty during social interactions. Three experiments explored whether expectancy-violating partners engender "threat" responses in perceivers. Participants interacted with confederates who violated or confirmed expectations while multiple measures were assessed, including cardiovascular reactivity, task performance, appraisals, and behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants interacted with White or Latino confederates who described their family backgrounds as either high or low socioeconomic status. In Experiment 3, participants interacted with Asian or White confederates who spoke with expected accents or southern accents. Participants interacting with expectancy-violating partners (e.g., Asians with southern accents) exhibited cardiovascular responses consistent with threat, poorer task performance, and manifested negative and defeat-related behavior. Implications for decreasing prejudicial responses via uncertainty reduction are discussed.     

INCREASING HANDICAPPED PRESCHOOLERS' PEER SOCIAL INTERACTIONS: CROSS-SETTING AND COMPONENT ANALYSIS

The purposes of our study were: (a) to train a set of observationally determined social behaviors via peer initiation; (b) to determine if effects generalized across classroom settings and to directly intervene if generalization did not occur; and (c) to analyze components of the peer-initiation intervention. After baseline, nonhandicapped preschool children (confederates) were taught to direct social initiations to the three handicapped preschool-aged students. Teachers prompted the confederates to engage the students in social interaction when necessary and rewarded the confederates with tokens. Confederates' initiations to the students resulted in increased frequencies of positive social interaction. There was no generalization to other classroom settings, and the intervention was subsequently implemented in a second and third classroom. Next, the confederates' token reinforcement system was withdrawn, with no apparent deleterious effects on the confederates' or students' social interactions. When teachers substantially reduced their prompts to the confederates, students' social interactions decreased. Finally, reinstatement of teacher prompts resulted in increases in the confederates' social initiations and, consequently, the positive social interactions of the students.     

The effects of confederate influence and confidence on the accuracy of crime judgements

Building on recent work which has investigated social influences on memory and remembering, the present experiment examined the effects of social pressure and confederate confidence on the accuracy and confidence of eyewitnesses. Sixty undergraduate participants watched a video of a staged mugging and then answered questions about the video out loud in the presence of either one or three confederates who had also watched the film with them. Unbeknownst to the participant, the confederate(s) always gave incorrect responses to four out of the eight questions. Participants and confederates were also asked to give confidence scores out loud for each of their answers. Again, unbeknownst to the participant, the confederate(s) always expressed either high or low confidence scores for the incorrect information, depending on condition. Participants gave fewer correct answers, and were less confident, in the presence of three, as opposed to one, confederates. Participants were also more confident, yet no more accurate, when the confederate(s) gave high, as opposed to low, confidence scores. Thus the presumed independence of evidence given by multiple witnesses cannot be safely assumed.     

FORBIDDEN OR FORGIVEN?

This article describes a conceptual framework with which to study rape cross-societally. The model considers the powerful effects of social norms in condoning certain types of rape. It also distinguishes clearly between rape and sex by making the absence of female choice the fundamental factor in defining rape. Using this conceptual model as a guide, rape is examined in a random sample of 35 world societies. Rape is not a forbidden behavior; this research demonstrates the masking effects of social norms that tend to institutionalize rape within various social customs or rituals. The concept of a rape-free culture was not supported; rape was found in all the sample societies once the definition of rape was broadened to include socially condoned rapes. The presence of both normative (condoned) and nonnormative (uncondoned) rapes in a majority of the societies studied illustrates that rape is regulated rather than prohibited. Implications for defining and studying rape in the United States are discussed.     

Interpersonal Reactions to Depression and Physical Disablllty In Dyadic Interactions1

Examined the interpersonal responses of persons engaged in dyadic interactions with confederates who enacted either depressed or socially appropriate roles and appeared either with or without a physical disability. Subject negative evaluations of confederates were indirectly obtained from a thought-listing measure. The overt behaviors of subjects were surreptitiously recorded on videotape and measures of verbal and nonverbal behavior were acquired. Subjects spoke less to the depressed targets and had significantly higher rates of negative evaluations of these persons. In addition, subjects gazed less at the depressed confederates. These effects were not moderated by target physical appearance. Findings are discussed as they relate to social models of depression and the stigmatizing effects of disability.     

Hostile and benevolent reactions toward pregnant women: complementary interpersonal punishments and rewards that maintain traditional roles

A naturalistic field study investigated behavior toward pregnant (vs. nonpregnant) women in nontraditional (job applicant) and traditional (store customer) roles. Female confederates, who sometimes wore a pregnancy prosthesis, posed as job applicants or customers at retail stores. Store employees exhibited more hostile behavior (e.g., rudeness) toward pregnant (vs. nonpregnant) applicants and more benevolent behavior (e.g., touching, overfriendliness) toward pregnant (vs. nonpregnant) customers. A second experiment revealed that pregnant women are especially likely to encounter hostility (from both men and women) when applying for masculine as compared with feminine jobs. The combination of benevolence toward pregnant women in traditional roles and hostility toward those who seek nontraditional roles suggests a system of complementary interpersonal rewards and punishments that may discourage pregnant women from pursuing work that violates gender norms.     

Susceptibility to peer influence: using a performance-based measure to identify adolescent males at heightened risk for deviant peer socialization

A substantial amount of research has suggested that adolescents' attitudes and behaviors are influenced by peers; however, little is known regarding adolescents' individual variability, or susceptibility, to peer influence. In this study, a performance-based index from an experimental paradigm was used to directly measure adolescents' susceptibility to peers. A total of 36 adolescent boys participated in a "chat room" experiment in which they ostensibly were exposed to deviant or risky social norms communicated either by high-peer-status (i.e., popular, well-liked) or low-peer-status (i.e., unpopular, disliked) grade mates who actually were electronic confederates. Changes in adolescents' responses before and after exposure to peer norms were used as a measure of peer influence susceptibility. These same adolescents completed a questionnaire assessment at the study outset and again 18 months later to assess their actual engagement in deviant behavior and their perceptions of their best friend's engagement in deviant behavior. Only among adolescents with high levels of susceptibility to high-status peers was a significant longitudinal association revealed between their best friend's baseline deviant behavior and adolescents' own deviant behavior 18 months later. Findings support the predictive validity of a performance-based susceptibility measure and suggest that adolescents' peer influence susceptibility may generalize across peer contexts.     

The Problem of Behaviour Change: From Social Norms to an Ingroup Focus

Social norms are of increasing interest to public policy experts and those conducting behaviour change interventions (e.g. safe driving, recycling). While there is agreement that social norms play a central role in explaining behaviour, such consensus is lacking when it comes to explaining the process through which this occurs. Economics, social marketing and political science focus on individual self‐interest and goal satisfaction and social (dis)approval. In contrast social psychology also incorporates collective interests through its analysis of social identity and ingroup processes. To fully understand behaviour change, it is argued that greater engagement is needed with the links between shifts in social identity, and ingroup norms. As definitions of who “we” are shift, so too does what “we” do. Implications for behaviour change interventions are discussed.     

Presence and television.

Film and a number of emerging entertainment technologies offer media consumers an illusion of nonmediation known as presence. To investigate the possibility that television can evoke presence, 65 undergraduate students were shown brief examples of rapid point‐of‐view movement from commercially available videotapes on a television with either a small screen (12 inches [30.5 cm], measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches [116.8 cm]). Participants' responses were measured via a questionnaire and a computer‐based recording of arousal (electrodermal activity). Viewers of both televisions reported an enjoyable sense of physical movement, excitement, involvement, and a sense of participation. Furthermore, as predicted, participants who watched the large screen television thought the movement in the scenes was faster, experienced a greater sense of physical movement, enjoyed the movement to a greater extent, found the viewing experience more exciting, and were more physiologically aroused. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Interpersonal and emotional processes in generalized anxiety disorder analogues during social interaction tasks

Persons with chronic worry and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) report maladaptive social cognitions, interpersonal behaviors, and emotional regulation. Because research has neither investigated these processes in actual social situations nor explored whether they take heterogeneous forms, the present study provides the first attempt to do so in a laboratory investigation. GAD analogue participants and nonanxious controls interacted with confederates in an unstructured collaborative story construction task and an emotional disclosure task with standardized confederate behavior. In both tasks, relative to controls, some GAD analogues highly overestimated, whereas others markedly underestimated, their negative (Hostile-Submissive) interpersonal impact on confederates. Although GAD analogues, as a group, exhibited greater sad affect during disclosures than controls, their openness during disclosures and liking by confederates varied with their level of misestimation of negative interpersonal impact. Results underscore the need to further explore interpersonal processes in chronic worriers and how they may exacerbate or maintain dysfunction.     

Where Do Social Norms Come From?

ABSTRACT— Where do social norms come from? Part of the answer must surely lie in such norms' ability to support individual adaptive success in local ecologies. This theme is dominant in analyses of social behavior by economic game theorists and behavioral-ecology researchers, but it has been neglected by psychologists. An illustration of the methods and advantages of the adaptationist approach to understanding the emergence of social norms is provided. Some surprising behavioral results from modern industrial societies that reflect social-sharing norms of modern hunter-gatherer societies are consistent with our adaptive analysis.     

Effects of Social Norms Information and Self-Affirmation on Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption Intentions and Behaviors

The separate and combined efficacy of a social norms and a self-affirmation intervention to motivate decreased sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption was examined in 2 experiments. College students were randomly assigned to receive information about SSB consumption risks, norms, both, or neither. In addition, participants performed either a self-affirmation or control task. Self-affirmation only weakly affected SSB consumption intentions and behaviors. However, participants in Experiment 2 who received risks information, norms information, or both reported greater SSB reduction intentions than did those who received no information. Two weeks later, those who received both types of information reported more frequent behavior change preparations, and it appears this effect may have been partially mediated by the changes in intentions to reduce SSB consumption.     

Minority Influence

The present paper reviews social psychological research on minority influence. Minorities by proposing alternative and original ideas are often an agent of innovation and social change for societies. They create social conflict by proposing alternative propositions to the established societal perceptions. Minorities are, usually, numerically small groups that question social norms. Minorities influence people’s thinking, attitudes, and behavior by being consistent and flexible in their negotiation with majority members. Their influence is more often latent (i.e., evident on delayed, indirect, and private measures) than manifest. They affect the amount, and the quality, of cognitive processing of their messages (triggered by the different elaboration demands of the influence situation). Minority influence interacts with various situational factors such as social identity (in‐group or out‐group) and the task employed (e.g., objective or opinion) leading to different kinds of influence outcomes.     

Both young and older adults discount suggestions from older adults on a social memory test

In the present study, we examined the impacts of participant age and confederate age on social memory processes. During a collaborative recall phase, young and older adult participants were exposed to the erroneous memory reports of a young or an older adult confederate. On a subsequent individual recall test, young and older adult participants were equally likely to incorporate the confederates’ erroneous suggestions into their memory reports, suggesting that participant age had a minimal effect on social memory processes. However, confederate age did have a marked effect: Young adult participants were less likely to incorporate misleading suggestions from older adult confederates and less likely to report “remembering” items suggested by older adult confederates. Critically, older adult participants were also less likely to incorporate misleading information from fellow older adult confederates. Both young and older adult participants discounted older adult confederates’ contributions to a memory test.     

How the Social Environment Shaped the Evolution of Mind

Dominance hierarchies are ubiquitous in the societies of human and non-human animals. Evidence from comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychological investigations is presented that show how social dominance hierarchies shaped the evolution of the human mind, and hence, human social institutions. It is argued that the pressures that arise from living in hierarchical social groups laid a foundation of fundamental concepts and cognitive strategies that are crucial to surviving in social dominance hierarchies. These include recognizing and reasoning transitively about dominance relations, fast-track learning of social norms (permissions, prohibitions, and obligations), detecting violations of social norms (cheating), monitoring reciprocal obligations, and reading the intentions of others.     

Towards a normative change approach in child labour: A theoretical analysis and empirical exploration of the constituted and constitutive procedural social norms

Growing evidence in the field of child labour has identified social norms among the key antecedents. Social norms regulate actions of people within the social order. Where social norms are institutionalized and legitimized, people conform to them out of a sense of duty. It is argued that legitimate, deep-rooted, and institutionalized social norms are difficult to change. Yet, there have been some significant improvements in research suggesting that normative change programs can effectively shift deep-rooted social norms. In this study, we explored a pathway to change social norms that underpin child labour practices in four major hubs of cocoa and sea fishing. We employed a bottom-up practice research approach to co-design the study, and implemented it through narrative vignette interviews. Using vignette stimulus, we interviewed parents (n = 40), with 20 of them perceived to have engaged their children in child labour, and stakeholders in the communities (n = 10). Findings from the narrative interviews revealed norms on informal apprenticeship, inheriting family business, and hard work, among the core child labour norms. We unraveled the constitutive procedural norms that legitimize and justify the child labour norms in the communities. Based on this, a normative change framework has been designed and supported with suggested intervention programs to shift the social norms.     

第三方惩罚的神经机制：来自经颅直流电刺激的证据

第三方惩罚既是社会规范在群体得以维系的基石, 也是个体维护社会规范的体现。当前关注社会规范的神经研究大多基于第二方惩罚的独裁者或最后通牒实验框架, 缺乏对第三方维护社会规范过程中相关脑区活动的探索, 对这一过程的内在神经机制也不清楚。本文基于第三方惩罚的独裁者博弈框架, 对右侧背外侧前额叶区域(DLPFC)进行不同极性的经颅直流电刺激(tDCS), 同时依据第三方是否需要为其惩罚付出成本设计了零成本和有成本两个实验任务。结果发现, 第三方在零成本任务的情绪反应和惩罚显著受到tDCS设置的影响, 且阴极刺激显著提升了第三方的惩罚值, 这表明情绪机制对第三方惩罚有着重要影响。另外, 第三方在零成本和有成本任务中的惩罚差异在不同tDCS设置之间也存在显著差异, 这与第三方惩罚还受到自利机制影响的观点相符。本文率先为右侧DLPFC活动影响第三方惩罚提供了神经层面的证据, 且支持了第三方对社会规范的遵从与其负性情绪反应和自利加工密切相关的机制解释。     

The Application of the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) in Predicting General Social Adaptation and Specific Social Behaviors in a Dyadic Interaction

The goal of this study was to evaluate the ability of the harm avoidance (HA) and cooperativeness (C) dimensions of the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) to predict general social adaptation as measured by the Social Adaptation Self-Evaluation scale and specific social behaviors during a dyadic social interaction. A sample of 58 healthy volunteers participated in a social interaction with confederates. Social adaptation was negatively associated with HA scores (β= -.49), but positively associated with C scores (β= - .46). Eye-contact patterns were predicted by C scores based on general linear modeling (GLM) analysis. The results suggest that TCI should be included for the evaluation of treatment effects on social functioning.