Crystal Smit

Social Network Intervention 2 41 compared to the children in the control conditions. Future research should investigate the status of peers into more detail. Contrary to expectations, the children exposed to the social network-based intervention did not report a change in their intentions (H3). There are several explanations for the stability (instead of an increase) in water drinking intentions in the intervention condition. First, it might be that the children modeled the drinking behavior of their peers unconsciously, while self-reported intentions require being conscious of one’s behavior and plans (Cruwys et al., 2015; Nolan, Schultz, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2008). Research has shown that children follow the food intake behavior of their peers, even after being told explicitly what social modeling behavior is and having practiced social influence situations (Bevelander, Engels, Anschütz, & Wansink, 2013). We acknowledge that this does not explain why the influence agents maintained (rather than increased) their water drinking intentions, given they were the ones who were being modeled. A possible explanation might be that the influence agents were not able to report greater water drinking intentions, because they already consumed more water. A second explanation for the stability in the children’s intentions might be that measuring an individual’s intention to change might not provide a complete picture of actual behavior change (Sheeran, 2002; Sniehotta, Scholz, & Schwarzer, 2005). To explain this discrepancy between intention and behavior other possible mediators must be examined (Sniehotta et al., 2005). Additionally, we found that the nonexposed children reported a decrease in their water drinking intentions over time. This significant decrease in water drinking intentions could have been caused by frustration resulted from asking the nonexposed children about their intentions for a second time. Unlike the children in the intervention condition, the nonexposed children were not motivated to uphold their opinion towards water, which might explain why the decrease was only observed in the control condition. Furthermore, it is important to note that this study was the first that incorporated self-persuasion theory (i.e., motivating individuals to persuade themselves;