International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

What people choose to do, the behaviors they enact or refrain from enacting, is guided by a number of factors, including their own dispositions, the situational context in which they find themselves, the social roles they take on, and their interpersonal relationships. The study of how people's behaviors are guided, in part, by social norms has been the focus of considerable research in recent years. Although the influence of norms on human behavior occurs across many domains, a great deal of research has focused on understanding normative influences in health-related behaviors, likely because of the inclusion of the subjective norm concept in the theory of reasoned action (TRA; Ajzen & Fishbein 1980 ); the TRA has been widely used to predict health behaviors (→  Reasoned Action, Theory of ). Norms have been conceptualized in several ways, but terms identified in the literature that deal implicitly or explicitly with the influence of referent others' attitudes or behaviors on people's own behaviors include: subjective norms ( Ajzen & Fishbein 1980 ), social norms ( Perkins & Berkowitz 1986 ), normative influences ( Cialdini et al. 1990 ), or simply norms ( Bendor & Swistak 2001 ). Cialdini et al. (1990) make a conceptual distinction between two different types of norms: descriptive and injunctive. Descriptive norms are conceptualized as perceptions about the ... log in or subscribe to read full text