Objectives: the specific objectives of the study are identified as follows: 1) to determine the influence of impulsivity on alcohol abuse, (2) to determine the peer group influence on alcohol abuse, (3) To determine the interplay of gender on alcohol abuse and (4) to determine whether interaction between impulsivity, peer group influence and gender has any an effect on alcohol abuse. Method: data was collected from three hundred (300) student participants randomly selected. Age of participants ranged from 17-40 years with mean age of 21. The statistical analysis used was a three way analysis of variance. Results: Results revealed a significant main effect of impulsivity on alcohol abuse, F (35.696, p < 0.001) as well as gender, F (20.869, p < 0.001) but there was no significant effect of peer group influence on alcohol abuse. In addition, it was noted that the interaction between the three variables had no significant effect in predicting alcohol abuse. Recommendations: Universities should create educational programmes for students and this should be done preferably in the first quarter of the year while recognizing that there are transition issues related to entering universities and adaptation could be negatively at its peak especially during the first few months, which makes it a critical period for prevention and intervention activities. / Thesis (Soc.Sc.(Clinical Psychology) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2014

The purpose of this research is twofold. Firstly, this research aims to investigate whether the design preferences of bloggers in selected countries from different cultural backgrounds are influenced by national culture traits. The investigation involves two categories of blogs selected within a country where the bloggers share similar attributes such as language or geographical location. Secondly, simultaneously, this research intends to discover the possibility of the impact of group level influence on design preferences of bloggers who are linked together in a network through bloggers’ linkage or blogrolls. To achieve the said purposes, observations on both the global and local blogs of six selected countries are conducted using the content analysis method. This method allows this research to observe web pages and rate design preferences of bloggers via a coding system, similar to the method used to analyse documents or manuscripts to find common themes or keywords. A total of 612 blogs (306 global and 306 local) are observed for a period of nine months to identify cultural traits on design behaviour based on national culture indicators chosen from prominent literatures. To prevent a systematic error, an independent second observer was appointed and the results obtained are compared using a statistical methodology. In addition, translators were also engaged to verify that the translations are of a correct meaning and comprehension since blogs use various national languages on their web pages. The data were statistically tested using SPSS engaging in statistical analysis of frequency table, Cross-Tabulation and cluster analyses and MANOVA. Results shown that design preferences between both the global and local blogs in each country, has significant differences in most of the design indicators chosen. The findings indicate that the national culture influence on design preferences in linked networks of blogs is weakening indicating another type of influence might be in existence. The results also provide evidence that blogs in linked networks are statistically significant as a cluster or a group by themselves and are independent from one cluster to another. The research, however, studies only six countries from six different cultural dimensions. The inclusion of other countries, similar to or different from the countries under investigation, would be an added advantage. Furthermore, the use of only a single type of global blog provider (blogspot.com) in this research could be extended to other global blog providers such as wordpress.com to give fairer coverage of major and popular global blogs as well as providing a wider generalisation effect of the research findings.

The problem of this study was to determine how capable college students are in making choices relevant to each other's success as student teachers when compared with (a) college faculty ratings, (b) the judgments of cooperating teachers, and (c) scores from two objective self-rating scales.

The consumer is a major actor in the market place, it is very important for a company to observe, identify and understand fully the attitudes of consumers before and after launching services and products. So it becomes obvious for marketers to know the factors which cause to affect the consumer’s attitude and then response. This thesis is to analyze the procedures of affecting consumers’ attitudes towards the brochures and website by visual perception, learning and group influence.

Risk is inherent in many social and economic decisions, such as the choice of pathway in secondary school, the choice of major at university, job decisions, health-related behaviour, marriage, parenthood, migration and the allocation of financial assets. Investigating the determinants of attitudes towards risk is therefore essential to fully understand how people make such decisions. Recent research has shown that individual risk attitudes are not immutable personality traits, but are influenced by external factors with the potential to change them in more or less enduring ways, such as the characteristics of the environment, emotional states, life experiences such as poverty, job loss or violence, and social relationships. This thesis studies external factors that play a role in shaping risk attitudes. Specifically, it focuses on two important environmental factors: social relationships and the incentive structure that individuals face (e.g., competition or teamwork). It is composed of three chapters. Each chapter of the thesis presents the results of a different laboratory experiment, in which individual risk behaviour is always measured using the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task - BRET (Crosetto and Filippin, 2013). This task asks participants to choose how many boxes to collect out of 100, knowing that 99 boxes contain £0.10 while one contains a bomb, but without knowing in which box the bomb is located. They can therefore choose their preferred lottery among 100 lotteries whose outcomes and probabilities are fully described only by one parameter, i.e., the number of collected boxes. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes collected, but they are all lost if the bomb lies in one of the collected boxes. In the first two chapters, risk behaviour is measured both before and after the treatment manipulation, and feedback on the peers’ ex-ante risk behaviour is used as a channel to study peer influence on the subjects’ ex-post risk behaviour. The first two chapters provide new evidence that individual risk behaviour is influenced by the risk behaviour of the peer group and offer one explanation for why peer effects are not always present and vary in intensity. This is due to the fact that individuals are more influenced by those peers with whom they feel more bonded. Specifically, in the first chapter I study how group identity (that is, the portion of an individual’s self-concept derived from the sense of belonging to the social group) affects peer effects on risk behaviour. I induce different levels of group identity through different matching protocols (random or based on individual painting preferences) and the possibility of interacting with group members via an online chat in a group task. I find that subjects are affected by their peers when taking decisions and that a stronger group identity amplifies the influence of peers: painting preferences matching significantly reduces the heterogeneity of risk behaviour compared with random matching. On the other hand, introducing a group task has no significant effect on behaviour, possibly because this interaction does not always contribute to enhancing group identity. The second chapter digs deeper into this evidence by investigating the role of the incentive structure that characterizes the individuals’ environment. Since the first chapter shows that peer effects vary in intensity, I hypothesize that different types of incentive schemes may have different effects on peer relationships and, therefore, affect peer effects on risk behaviour. Using a real effort task, which consists of recognizing the value and the country of origin of a random sequence of Euro coins, I compare piece-rate compensation first with a cooperation-based and then with a competition-based incentive scheme. I find that competition significantly reduces attachment to peers and more than halves peer influence on risk behaviour compared with piece-rate compensation, despite the fact that the latter effect is not statistically significant. Such findings suggest that, when designing and evaluating an optimal compensation scheme, it may be important to also consider how peer effects on subsequent risk behaviour will in turn affect future decisions involving risk. For example, in research and development, competition may improve the results of current projects, but risk attitudes will shape the types of future projects that are attempted. The third chapter restricts the attention to competition and enquires whether this type of incentive scheme has a direct effect on risk-taking behaviour, beyond any social comparison, and whether its impact on subsequent risk behaviour is heterogeneous according to gender. Risk behaviour is measured after the performance of a real effort task, consisting of recognizing the value and country of origin of Euro coins, incentivized either as a tournament with fixed rewards or as a random draw with the same monetary payoffs. The data show that competition does not significantly affect subsequent risk-taking behaviour when considering the full sample. However, there is a positive relationship between competition and risk aversion for males, who become significantly more risk-averse after losing a competition than after randomly earning the same low payoff. In contrast, males do not become more risk-seeking after winning the tournament, while the average risk-taking behaviour of females is unaffected by tournament participation and outcomes. The reaction of males to negative outcomes might be driven by intrinsic motives, such as emotions or a shift in the locus of control from internal to external. Overall, the evidence presented here shows that risk attitudes are not immutable but may be shaped by external factors. Of particular importance is the role played by the risk behaviour of peers, which begins to emerge even when bonds are weak and becomes stronger as the social link intensifies. Any policy that aims to change risk attitudes (or that does so indirectly) will thus see its effects spread to the target subjects’ peers, and may amplify its success if the peer group is chosen wisely. Changing the characteristics of the subjects’ environment by introducing competition weakens their attachment to the competing peers and may attenuate peer effects on risk behaviour. In addition, competition per se has no impact on subsequent risk behaviour, except for males who become more risk-averse after losing.

This thesis investigates variation in human cooperative behaviour in naturally occurring contexts. I critically assess the prevailing consensus on human cooperation derived from laboratory games (such as the dictator and public goods games), by identifying real life analogues and conducting extensive field observation and experiments. My second chapter investigates the importance of context on social behaviour by taking a commonly used laboratory game, the dictator game, and studying analogous behaviour, giving to mendicants in the street. I conclude that individuals cooperate less in the wild than they do in the laboratory and that monetary pay-offs are important in cooperative decision-making. My third chapter examines how social cues influence peoples' likelihood of giving to mendicants. I conclude that increased group size and crowd density negatively affect donation behaviour. My fourth chapter investigates dog fouling in public parks to understand the causes of variation in cheating in a naturally occurring public goods game. I conclude that despite evidence that a social game is being played, the cues that influences decisions are unclear, and behaviour may depend on local social norms. My fifth chapter investigates social influences on red light jumping by cyclists at pedestrian crossings. I find that the probability of cheating is higher with fewer observers and when other cyclists also cheat.

Submitted by Guilherme Ramos (guilhermedearamos@yahoo.com.br) on 2018-10-10T16:49:15Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Master Thesis_Guilherme Ramos_submitted.pdf: 999203 bytes, checksum: cadbd02a289a643e51d22ad07260c5e4 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by ÁUREA CORRÊA DA FONSECA CORRÊA DA FONSECA (aurea.fonseca@fgv.br) on 2018-10-11T14:06:40Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Master Thesis_Guilherme Ramos_submitted.pdf: 999203 bytes, checksum: cadbd02a289a643e51d22ad07260c5e4 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-10-29T13:04:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Master Thesis_Guilherme Ramos_submitted.pdf: 999203 bytes, checksum: cadbd02a289a643e51d22ad07260c5e4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-09-13 / Prior literature has demonstrated that liberals and conservatives often diverge on policy issues partly because they have different psychological characteristics and partly because they are influenced by in- and out-groups (e.g., parties). In the present work, we investigate a relatively under-investigated topic, namely marijuana legalization, and test whether groupness affect opinion toward this policy over and above potential differences in psychological traits and states (e.g., personality, cognitive processing). Additionally, building on literature on morality and divergence from reference groups, we propose that part of the right-wing’s opposition to this policy comes from moral repugnance against out-groups. Results are consistent with our predictions. Study 1 validated an important assumption: individuals strongly associate marijuana legalization as a leftist policy. Importantly, study 2 showed that when marijuana legalization was endorsed by a center-right politician, individuals along the political spectrum expressed similar support for the policy; nevertheless, political ideology became a significant predictor of policy support when a leftist politician was behind the policy. This interaction was mostly due to rightwing individuals becoming less favorable toward the policy when a left-wing politician was behind it. Left-wing individuals, in turn, did not significantly shift their opinion. Finally, we discuss limitations, alternative explanations, and avenues for future research, while also proposing a third study which could more precisely test our theory.

Social media sites and platforms have been on the rise for the last decade. Especially sincethe start of the still on-going Covid-19 pandemic it reached an all time high. Over half of theworld’s population is using social media. Everyone knows Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,TikTok, Snapchat, and many more. This fact has not gone unnoticed by companies as theyincreasingly integrate social media into their portfolio. Social media advertising is nowadayseverywhere. There is not a single site without any ads. Regardless the research about it is stillvery scarce. This master thesis will investigate the influence of social media advertising on consumerbehavior. More detailed it will focus on how consumers react to advertisements. For thispurpose, a quantitative survey has been conducted. The base for this survey is a developedconceptual framework based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model and the Value-Belief-Norm theory model. Further factors of the survey include different values and beliefs onwhich the analysis is depending. The main value playing a role in this study is sociallyresponsible consumption behavior. This value tackles how much consumers care about theenvironment and the human society. Simply spoken, how sustainable and how social do theybehave. Furthermore, three beliefs have been chosen in tandem with this value: Self -confidence, impulsiveness, and interpersonal/group influence. All are believed to have animpact on how consumers are perceiving advertisements they see on social media. Eachconnection between the value, the beliefs, and the reaction to advertisements will be tested.Believed connections are between the sustainability value of the consumers and the threebeliefs as well as towards the video. Further, it is believed that the beliefs will have an effecton the reaction to advertisements from consumers. My study will indicate how companies cantake advantage of advertisements to gain more followers on social media and sell moreproducts. The outcome of this study will present a clear picture of the role of sustainable andsocially responsible behavior towards ads on social media as well as the impact of beliefs.