With social norming, colleges present accurate information about student drinking norms, using mass-marketing techniques that show that the majority of students are not binge drinking or driving drunk. The approach is designed to end misconceptions that most college students misuse alcohol.

At Washington University, the "Just the Facts" campaign unveiled in August includes a website, 300 posters, ads in the student newspaper, and public-service announcements. The university is among 32 colleges and universities selected to participate in a five-year national study on the social-norms approach. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the U.S. Department of Education are funding the Social Norms Research Project.

"It's such a shift from the traditional way of thinking about prevention," said H. Wesley Perkins, sociology professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. "Usually, students see videos of mangled cars and hear testimonials of getting maimed or serving time in prison, but that doesn't happen to most people most of the time."

Perkins said emphasizing extreme events fails to get the attention of young adults "They aren't thinking about their health if they are 18- to 34-years-old. They are thinking about their social life," he said.

In the past five years, the social-norms approach has been gaining in popularity. However, Perkins said that while one-third of colleges and universities nationwide say they have a social-norms campaign, only 10 percent are implementing it effectively.

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