ABSTRACT
Norms influence behaviors, and do so even when the actors privately disagree with the norms and when the norms are imagined rather than real (Asch, 1955; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; Reno, Cialdini, & Kallgren, 1993; Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007; Sherif, 1936). National and campus surveys from recent years show that many college students in the U.S. focus on “drinking to get drunk.” In 1999, the severity of campus drinking at the University of Illinois (U of I) caught media attention when a campus survey revealed that an average of four U of I students per weekend were so incapacitated that they had to be hospitalized. Why did these young college men and women, mostly freshmen, drink to the point of endangering themselves? Data from the same survey showed that a major cause was misperception about the drinking norm on campus—first-semester freshmen thought that the average U of I student drank 15 drinks a week, when the reality was half that (Inside Illinois, September 18, 1999).
