Crystal Smit

Evaluation of the Motivation Process 5 121 Supporting the Influence Agents inMotivating Their Peers Providing the influence agents with the skills to promote the target behavior, by discussing possible water-promoting techniques with them, appears to have actually supported them in motivating their peers, as they mainly used the discussed water-promoting strategies. Of these, the influence agents mainly used face-to-face strategies and less often online strategies. In addition to applying the discussed water-promoting strategies, the influence agents also felt free to choose and devise their own strategies. This resulted in them also using more supportive strategies, such as providing support for the target behavior (“Can I fill your cup with water?”). They may have used these kinds of face-to-face strategies more often because they fit more naturally into their usual peer-to-peer exchanges than online strategies (Sebire et al., 2019). In addition, our findings showed that the peers did not perceive that the influence agents had changed the descriptive norm concerning water drinking. However, there was a trend indicating that they did perceive that their peers thought that they should drink more water. This could be related to the finding that they also experienced more social support from their peers to drink water. A possible explanation for not finding any changes in the descriptive norm and for the trend for the injunctive normmay lie in the fact that the promotion of these norms must be made salient to achieve an effect (Bicchieri, 2000). However, the underlying approach of social network interventions is that influence agents informally diffuse messages among their peers (Rogers, 2010). Therefore, in the training, the influence agents were taught to promote water using informal and non-salient strategies, such as drinking water themselves. This was done so that their peers would not notice that the agents were trying to influence their behavior and thus avoid reactance to the target health message (Brehm, 1966). Intervention Refinements This study identified a number of possible refinements that could be made to Share H 2 O intervention. First, the influence agents did not succeed in increasing