The authors introduce a social judgment framework they term deviance-regulation theory. This theory proposes that people self-regulate more on the basis of the perceived social consequences of deviating from behavioral norms than on the basis of the perceived social consequences of conforming to behavioral norms. The implications of this model were explored in the context of persuasive health communication. Four studies demonstrated that health communication had its greatest effects on behavioral intention and behavioral willingness when it associated images with deviant behavioral alternatives. Thus, when participants believed their peers made healthy decisions, they were most influenced by negatively framed communication that emphasized the undesirable attributes of people who made unhealthy decisions. In contrast, when they believed their peers made unhealthy decisions, they were most influenced by positively framed communication that emphasized the desirable attributes of people who made healthy decisions.

Participants were 192 university students (96 males, 96 females) who completed the Body Esteem scale (Franzoi & Shields, 1984) under instructions to rate their feelings about their own bodies, rate their feelings about a specific or “average” student's body, and rate the importance they and others attached to these feelings. One of the findings is that when individuals perceived themselves as less positive on a particular desirable physical trait, they also rated the trait as less important to possess in the first place. The only exception to this was women's weight concern. It was also found that men generally rated themselves higher on body‐esteem subscales than they rated other men, while women did not exhibit such self‐serving evaluations of their bodies. One implication from these results is that the same self‐enhancement strategies successfully employed by individuals in other areas of self‐evaluations were not successful in enhancing one's body esteem, especially women's weight concern.

Based on attribution theory and the logic of conversational norms, we predicted that image-based health communications can alter prevalence estimates for health behaviors. In two studies, participants were exposed either to a positively-framed or negatively-framed communication advocating for specific health behaviors. As predicted, participants who read a health communication rated healthy behaviors as less common when positive attributes were associated with healthy choices than when negative attributes were associated with unhealthy choices. The second study revealed that this pattern was most pronounced among participants who reported initial uncertainty about behavioral norms. These findings suggest that positively-framed influence attempts can promote prevalence assumptions that work against the influence attempt.

Many students, particularly underprepared students, struggle to identify the essential information in empirical articles. We describe a set of assignments for instructing general psychology students to dissect the structure of such articles. Students in General Psychology I read empirical articles and answered a set of general, factual questions applicable to nearly any empirical article. Students in General Psychology II read empirical articles and wrote two-page summaries based on the question set from General Psychology I. In both courses, student competence on the assignment and confidence in their ability to complete the assignment improved, suggesting that these assignments aid students in learning to dissect empirical articles.