Activating social norms: Examining the effects of injunctive, aligned and misaligned norm messages on activity behaviour

Abstract

Two common types of social norms are descriptive (what others do) and injunctive (what ought to be done; Cialdini et al., 1990).  While descriptive norms have been related to activity (Priebe & Spink, 2011), injunctive norms have received less attention.  The first purpose of this study examined whether injunctive norm messages would influence activity behaviour more than no message.  Given the existence of these two norm types and the prevalence of mismatched messages in practice (e.g., “you should be active but the majority are not”), another question concerns the effects on behaviour when norm messages are aligned (matched injunctive/descriptive) vs. misaligned (mismatched injunctive/descriptive), which formed the second purpose.  Participants were assigned to either an injunctive (n=11), aligned (n=12), misaligned (n=12) or control (n=12) condition, then performed two maximum-effort planks.  Between planks, injunctive were given a message that most others thought they should hold their second plank longer; aligned received the same message as well as one stating most others actually held their second plank longer; misaligned received the same injunctive message but were told most others did not hold their second plank longer; control received no message.  ANCOVA (controlling for plank 1) and post hoc results revealed that injunctive did not differ from control (p>.10) while those in the aligned condition held their second plank longer than all other conditions (p’s<.05).  Findings suggest that injunctive norms might not be powerful enough to impact change in activity and aligned norm messages might be more effective than misaligned messages.

Acknowledgments: 1st author supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Vanier Graduate Scholarship.