Whose Approval Matters Most? Examining Discrepancies in Self- and Other- Perceptions of Drinking

Abstract

Background

Research demonstrates that perceptions of others’ attitudes toward drinking behaviors (injunctive norms) are strong predictors of alcohol consumption and problems. Personalized normative feedback (PNF) aims to reduce the discrepancy between one’s perception of others’ attitudes toward drinking and others’ actual attitudes toward drinking. An implicit assumption of PNF is that self and (perceived) other attitudes toward drinking are aligned (thus, shifting one’s perceptions of others’ attitudes shifts one’s own attitudes). However, there is minimal research on the extent to which alignment (or discrepancy) in self-other attitudes toward drinking is associated with alcohol-related outcomes.

Methods

College students (N = 1,494; M_age = 20.11, 61.0% female, 66.4% White) who endorsed past-month heavy episodic drinking reported injunctive norms toward drinking on weekends, drinking daily, drinking to black out, and drinking and driving. Participants reported their perceptions of attitudes toward these drinking behaviors for three reference groups: close friends, typical university-affiliated peers, and parents. Outcomes included weekly drinking, alcohol problems, and alcohol-related risk.

Results

Response surface analyses indicated that alignment in approval (versus alignment in disapproval) of drinking demonstrated a linear association with alcohol-related outcomes. Discrepancies in self-peer and self-parent attitudes were associated with alcohol-related outcomes and one’s own attitudes (versus one’s ratings of others’ attitudes) of drinking were more strongly associated with outcomes.

Conclusions

Results provide evidence of how self-other discrepancies in attitudes toward drinking are associated with alcohol-related outcomes. Future work is needed to test whether self-other discrepancies in attitudes toward drinking impacts response to norms-based interventions.

Keywords:

• Social norms
• social approval
• individual differences
• alcohol use
• alcohol problems

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Disclosure statement

The authors of this manuscript have no conflicts of interest to report.

Notes

1 We conducted a series of sensitivity analyses that included demographic covariates (i.e., age, race, ethnicity, gender identity, and Greek status) to examine whether our results were robust when accounting for covariates. Accounting for covariates had a very minimal impact on the parameter estimates in the model; thus, we report and interpret the findings from the main models in the main text and include results from our sensitivity analyses in supplementary material (see Table S1).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism [Piccirillo, K99AA029459; Schultz, F32AA028667; Larimer, R37AA012547].