Matthew Maxwell-Smith

Huron University College · Department of Management & Organizational Studies

Many adolescents face pressure when it comes to securing social media attention in the form of views, comments and/or likes on their posted content. The purpose of this study was to examine how this pressure impacts adolescents’ current relationships with friends in addition to their mental health over time. Participants were Canadian adolescents (...

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Instagram are a major part of the landscape of young adults' lives. SNSs are designed to encourage social connection and attention from others. However, deceptive like-seeking behaviors, which involve manipulative and deceitful acts to gain attention (e.g., buying followers, digitally modifying one's physical...

Consumers do not always follow their ideological beliefs about the need to engage in environmentally friendly (EF) consumption. We propose that Commitment to Beliefs (CTB)—the general tendency to follow one’s value-based beliefs—can help identify who is most likely to follow their environmental ideologies. We predicted that CTB would amplify the ef...

Emerging adults (ages 18–29) have the highest rates of both harmful drinking and participation on social network sites (SNSs) compared to adolescents and older adults. In fact, greater SNS participation has been shown to predict greater alcohol use. Little is known, however, about noncollege samples, substances apart from alcohol, and SNSs other th...

Background: Emerging adults consume alcohol most often with their peer drinking groups. Yet, little is known about the role of drinking group norms on individual members' drinking consequences, nor about the mechanisms that underlie this association. Objectives: We examined the indirect relationship between drinking group descriptive norms (perc...

We examined the extent to which emerging adults engage in different behaviors on Instagram, a popular social networking site, to gain attention and validation from others via “likes.” We also examined individual differences in the frequency of like-seeking behavior and motives for Instagram use as mediators of these relationships. Participants (N =...

Social conflicts are ubiquitous to the human condition and occur throughout markets, marketing processes, and marketing systems. When unchecked or unmitigated, social conflict can have devastating consequences for consumers, marketers, and societies, especially when conflict escalates to war. In this article, the authors offer a systemic analysis o...

Research on the effects of intergroup competition has relied on various conceptual approaches and has produced inconsistent findings. Following a review of the intergroup competition literature, we propose a framework which emphasizes that the influence of intergroup competition varies primarily according to participants’ construal of potentially c...

Although research suggests that male peers play an important role in young men’s bar aggression, little is known about specific peer-related predictors of this behaviour. Both bar aggression and heavy alcohol consumption are associated with traditional masculinity and peer-acceptance among young men; thus, engagement in these behaviours may help yo...

The Commitment to Beliefs (CTB) framework (Maxwell-Smith & Esses, 2012) proposes that there are individual differences in the extent to which people generally follow beliefs that are a reflection of their values. The current research hypothesized that CTB would amplify the effects of perceived belief dissimilarity or incompatibility, such that indi...

The authors developed a new dispositional measure of Commitment to Beliefs (CTB)—the degree to which people feel it is important to follow their value-expressive beliefs—across three phases of research. In Phases 1 and 2 (Studies 1–4), the CTB scale demonstrated strong internal consistency, and convergent and discriminant validity. Phase 3 demonstr...