Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Award Winner
Recipient of the 2005 Outstanding Master's Thesis Award - First Place.
To go to the Graduate Student Award Recipients collection page, click here.
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
College students--Social life and customs; Dormitory life; Culture;
Abstract
Top-down models of culture provide a useful although limited understanding of cultural content, formation, and change. Previous theorizing using bottom-up models help to explain why cultures exist and explain some of their content. Dynamic social impact theory (DSIT; Latane, 1996) expands on previous bottom-up models by proposing a concise mechanism for cultural content transmission and the dynamic outcome of this process. Furthermore, the catastrophe theory of attitudes (Latane & Nowak, 1994) suggests that the level of involvement of an issue will modify attitude change and therefore modify DSIT's predictions. The present study expanded on previous research to offer a more complete field test of DSIT (Latane, 1996) and explore how involvement and communication may affect cultural content and change. A total of 1252 students from four residence halls participated in four online surveys over the course of the Fall 2002 semester. Participants indicated that more of their friends and conversers lived in their house than in any other social unit. In the 11 weeks between the first survey and the final survey, students became more similar to those they lived with and the correlation between their attitudes and behaviors increased. However, the consolidation prediction of DSIT was not supported. Participants did not become more similar on high importance issues than on low importance issues. Unexpectedly, variance and minority size increased more over time for low importance items than for high importance items. Limitations of the study included low discussion rates of the items and a large portion of the participants having a prior history together, suggesting they may have been similar in their attitudes and behaviors prior to living in the residence halls. Future research avenues and implications for DSIT (Latane, 1996) and CTA (Latane & Nowak, 1994) are discussed.
Year of Submission
2003
Year of Award
2005 Award
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of Psychology
First Advisor
Helen C. Harton, Chair, Thesis Committee
Date Original
8-2003
Object Description
1 PDF file (v, 209 pages)
Copyright
©2003 Jerry G. Cullum
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Cullum, Jerry G., "Culture from chaos: The formation of social norms from the dynamic self-organization of individuals' attitudes and behavior" (2003). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 588.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/588
Comments
If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit an email request to scholarworks@uni.edu. Include your name and clearly identify the thesis by full title and author as shown on the work.