The influence of the environment on students’ social norms

Abstract

Littering is one of the serious problems widely discussed in Georgia together with other ecological problems.
Unfortunately, littering has become a habit for a lot of citizens. People lack or don’t have at all the sense of social
responsibility to take care of the cleanliness of public places around them. Littering contaminates the environment
and water resources. The imprudent behavior of people harms nature. Littering is an increasing social issue with
esthetic, financial, and health-related expenses. That’s why this social problem has become an area of research
interest for applied social psychology. Cialdini and his colleagues point out that people follow two kinds of norms:
injunctive norms, which are people’s perceptions of what behaviors are approved or disapproved of by others, and
descriptive norms, those that are people’s perceptions of how people actually behave. The research question was
how students conform to the descriptive norms against littering in natural conditions. There was a hypothesis that
students in a group (in spite of the variations of the terms of the experiment) would strictly conform to the descriptive
norms against littering and wouldn’t contaminate their classrooms. The given hypothesis was confirmed.