Water availability and conservation are among today’s top global issues, and urban irrigated landscapes have a pronounced role to play in developing solutions to water scarcity problems. Innovative approaches are needed to promote water conservation outside of the home, and social norms comprise one such type of strategy that can accelerate the use of landscape water conservation technologies and practices. However, social expectations (injunctive norms) and others’ engagement in a behavior (descriptive norms) are often not fully considered, and these normative influences are often not measured beyond the traditional ‘important others’. A national survey was used to gather quantitative data from 2601 individuals across the United States. Framed by the Reasoned Action Approach, data were collected on participants’ attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and injunctive and descriptive norms relative to the traditional important others along with neighbors, other state residents, and other national residents. In the absence of the additional three groups, both descriptive and injunctive norms predicted water conservation intentions in a multiple regression model. When the additional referents were added, neighborhood and state descriptive norms and neighborhood injunctive norms overpowered injunctive norms drawn from important others. The perceived actions of important others (descriptive norms) remained the most powerful predictor. Normative beliefs specific to certain referent groups explain additional variation in behavioral intent beyond that of norms associated with important others. The findings revealed neighbors’ approval of conservation practices may be even more important than approval from those people an individual defines as important. Altogether, an understanding of perceptions of whether important others, neighbors, and people across the state conserve (descriptive norms) as well as what their neighbors approve of (injunctive norms) explains United States residents’ intent to engage in water conservation.

水资源的获取和保护是当今全球最关注的问题之一，城市灌溉景观在开发解决水资源短缺问题的解决方案中发挥着显著作用。需要创新的方法来促进家庭外的节水，而社会规范就是其中一种策略，可以加快景观用水技术和实践的使用。但是，人们通常没有充分考虑社会期望（禁令）和其他人对某种行为的参与（描述性规范），而且这些规范性影响通常没有超越传统的“重要他人”来衡量。一项全国性调查被用来收集全美国2601名个人的定量数据。在“理性行动方法”的框架下，收集了有关参与者态度的数据，相对于传统的重要他人以及邻居，其他州居民和其他本国居民而言，具有感知的行为控制以及禁令和描述性规范。在没有其他三组的情况下，描述性和禁令性标准都可以在多元回归模型中预测节水意图。当添加其他参考对象时，邻域和州的描述性规范以及邻域的禁令规范压倒了其他重要的禁令规范。重要他人的感知行为（描述性规范）仍然是最有力的预测指标。特定于特定对象群体的规范性信念解释了行为意图上的其他变化，这些行为意图超出了与其他重要对象相关的规范的变化。调查结果表明，邻居对保护实践的认可甚至比个人认为重要的人们的认可更为重要。总而言之，对州内重要的其他人，邻居和人民是否保存（描述性规范）及其邻居批准的内容（禁令规范）的理解解释了美国居民从事节水的意愿。