Right, finally got around to starting to look into some of the links on Social Psychology. The wikipedia entry is the obvious starting point! And in there is a mention of something called persuasion, which definitely looks like something I want to look into further. Again, the Wikipdia entry on Persuasion is my starting point, and that lists a book by Robert Cialdini as one to look for: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Dr Robert Cialdini ( ISBN 0-688-12816-5 ). So that might be fruitful.

The other thing to do with that is to take that and look it up in Google scholar and see what has used it as a reference. That might be cool.

Found this over here on Marketing Green:

In his Focus Theory of Normative Conduct, Cialdini et al (1990) suggest that social norms influence acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. He identifies two types of social norms:

• Descriptive norms: “what [other] people typically do”
• Injunctive norms: “what [other] people typically approve or disapprove [of]”

“ Only by aligning descriptive norms…with injunctive norms,” Cialdini et al proposed, “ can one optimize the power of normative appeals.”

I think I may need to find that paper...