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University students in Poland and the United States, two countries that differ in individualistic-collectivistic orientation, indicated their willingness to comply with a request to participate without pay in a marketing survey. Half were asked to do so after considering information regarding their own history of compliance with such requests, whereas the other half were asked to do so after considering information regarding their peers’ history of such compliance. This was designed to assess the impact of two social influence principles (commitment/consistency and social proof, respectively) on participants’ decisions. As expected, although both principles were influential across cultures, the commitment/consistency principle had greater impact on Americans, whereas the social proof principle had greater impact on Poles. Additional analyses indicated that this effect was due principally, but not entirely, to participants’ personal individualistic-collectivistic orientations rather than to the dominant individualistic-collectivistic orientation of their cultures.

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The estimated cost of repairing damage caused to recreational sites annually is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These depreciative activities also reduce the quality of visitors' experiences in the damaged areas. Indirect methods, such as visitor education through brochures and signs, continue to be the least controversial management approaches to depreciative acts. Yet, the literature on studies examining the most effective message presentations remains sparse. A survey mailed to randomly selected National Association for Interpretation members assessed the perceived effectiveness of communications that encouraged positive conduct (prescriptive messages) versus those that discouraged negative conduct (proscriptive messages) in wildland and urban settings. Almost invariably, respondents viewed the encouragement-based prescriptive messages as more effective than the discouragement-based proscriptive messages. This finding stands in sharp contrast to an earlier study that discovered a preponderance of proscriptive versus prescriptive messages on signs in both wildland and urban recreational environments. Thus, although the great majority of interpreters see the encouragement of positive conduct as more effective, in practice, messages on signs are much more likely to discourage negative conduct. Reasons for this discrepancy are considered.

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