Crystal Smit

Chapter 6 130 we discuss the main findings from the perspective of self-determination theory, with an emphasis on intrinsic motivation. After that, we discuss the main findings from the perspective of social norms. The Role of Intrinsic Motivation This dissertation showed that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in achieving and maintaining healthy drinking behaviors in children. Chapters 2 and 4 of this dissertation showed that the Share H 2 O intervention, which stimulates positive peer influence and enhances intrinsic motivation, was an effective approach in improving healthy drinking behavior of children. In addition, Chapter 3 showed intrinsic motivation to be an important predictor of maintaining changes in children’s water consumption over time. The following sections address the findings regarding intrinsic motivation by discussing them separately for the influence agents and targeted peers. Intrinsic Motivation of the Influence Agents Chapter 5 showed that creating an autonomy-supportive climate in the training (Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Soenens, & Matos, 2005), which involved implementing techniques that support the influence agents’ psychological basic needs (Ryan & Deci, 2000), enhanced the intrinsic motivation to drink water and increased the actual water consumption of the influence agents. In particular, providing meaningful rationales (Gillison et al., 2019; Teixeira et al., 2020) based on short-term outcomes (Chandran &Menon, 2004) by collaborating together on a word web and an interactive presentation, played an important role in intrinsically motivating them. For instance, the influence agents mentioned that drinking water could help them focus better at school and reduce plastic waste in the ocean. Moreover, supporting the influence agents to generate their own arguments to convince themselves to drink more water alsomotivated them (Gillison et al., 2019; Teixeira et al., 2020), which was based on the self-persuasion technique (Aronson, 1999). Altogether, an increase in the influence agents’ intrinsic motivation may cause the observed changes in their water consumption to persist in the long