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"SOCIAL CONFORMITY"
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Conformity : the power of social influences
\"Conformity\" explores the phenomena of social influences and their consequences from a legal perspective.
Book
Dynamic Norms Promote Sustainable Behavior, Even if It Is Counternormative
It is well known that people conform to normative information about other people’s current attitudes and behaviors. Do they also conform to dynamic norms—information about how other people’s behavior is changing over time? We investigated this question in three online and two field experiments. Experiments 1 through 4 examined high levels of meat consumption, a normative and salient behavior that is decreasing in the United States. Dynamic norms motivated change despite prevailing static norms, increasing interest in eating less meat (Experiments 1–3) and doubling meatless orders at a café (Experiment 4). Mediators included the anticipation of less meat eating in the future (preconformity) and the inference that reducing meat consumption mattered to other people (Experiments 2 and 3). In Experiment 5, we took advantage of a natural comparison to provide evidence that dynamic norms can also strengthen social-norm interventions when the static norm is positive; a positive dynamic norm resulted in reduced laundry loads and water use over 3 weeks during a drought.
Journal Article
Overcoming COVID-19 vaccination resistance when alternative policies affect the dynamics of conformism, social norms, and crowding out
What is an effective vaccination policy to end the COVID-19 pandemic? We address this question in a model of the dynamics of policy effectiveness drawing upon the results of a large panel survey implemented in Germany during the first and second waves of the pandemic. We observe increased opposition to vaccinations were they to be legally required. In contrast, for voluntary vaccinations, there was higher and undiminished support. We find that public distrust undermines vaccine acceptance, and is associated with a belief that the vaccine is ineffective and, if enforced, compromises individual freedom. We model how the willingness to be vaccinated may vary over time in response to the fraction of the population already vaccinated and whether vaccination has occurred voluntarily or not. A negative effect of enforcement on vaccine acceptance (of the magnitude observed in our panel or even considerably smaller) could result in a large increase in the numbers that would have to be vaccinated unwillingly in order to reach a herd-immunity target. Costly errors may be avoided if policy makers understand that citizens’ preferences are not fixed but will be affected both by the crowding-out effect of enforcement and by conformism. Our findings have broad policy applicability beyond COVID-19 to cases in which voluntary citizen compliance is essential because state capacities are limited and because effectivenessmay depend on theways that the policies themselves alter citizens’ beliefs and preferences.
Journal Article
Unsuspecting souls : the disappearance of the human being
\"In Unsuspecting Souls, Barry Sanders examines modern society's indifference to the individual. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, when care for human beings began to disappear slowly, and ending with the modern era, when societal events require less person-to-person interaction and introduce radical changes in common attitudes toward death and life, Sanders laments that what makes us most human is slowly dying. Our days are filled with a continuous bombardment of 'information' that demands our attention and brings us out of our world and into a sterile one of inhumanity and abstraction. We've also lost the original sense of a collective consciousness. This loss has been culminating for two centuries now, dating back to the rise of European powers and worldwide colonization. We pick our poisons among several forms of radical fundamentalisms, each one not only a threat to the other but a threat to humanity itself.\"--From publisher description.
Book
National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1,
N
= 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (
N
= 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (
r
= −0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.
Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.
Journal Article
Millie Fleur's poison garden
Millie Fleur La Fae is new in Garden Glen, and she plans to plant her garden of strange and sometimes dangerous plants, but the town garden club does not approve of her and wants to tear it down.
BOOK
Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds
How socially transmitted behaviours spread and persist is shown in a wild animal population, revealing an effect of social conformity.
A little learning goes a long way
Although socially transmitted behaviours have been observed in several different species of birds and mammals, little is known about how such behaviours spread and persist. This paper demonstrates a remarkably strong effect of social conformity in wild birds, and elucidates its role in maintaining persistent foraging traditions. Lucy Aplin
et al
. taught two small groups of wild great tits a different novel foraging strategy and then tracked the spread of the strategy in wild populations when the trained birds were released back into their respective population groups. From just two trained birds, the strategy spread to 75% of the population, with sub-populations heavily biased to perform the technique trained in their group across at least two generations. Birds that had encountered both strategies adopted the local variant.
In human societies, cultural norms arise when behaviours are transmitted through social networks via high-fidelity social learning
1
. However, a paucity of experimental studies has meant that there is no comparable understanding of the process by which socially transmitted behaviours might spread and persist in animal populations
2
,
3
. Here we show experimental evidence of the establishment of foraging traditions in a wild bird population. We introduced alternative novel foraging techniques into replicated wild sub-populations of great tits (
Parus major
) and used automated tracking to map the diffusion, establishment and long-term persistence of the seeded innovations. Furthermore, we used social network analysis to examine the social factors that influenced diffusion dynamics. From only two trained birds in each sub-population, the information spread rapidly through social network ties, to reach an average of 75% of individuals, with a total of 414 knowledgeable individuals performing 57,909 solutions over all replicates. The sub-populations were heavily biased towards using the technique that was originally introduced, resulting in established local traditions that were stable over two generations, despite a high population turnover. Finally, we demonstrate a strong effect of social conformity, with individuals disproportionately adopting the most frequent local variant when first acquiring an innovation, and continuing to favour social information over personal information. Cultural conformity is thought to be a key factor in the evolution of complex culture in humans
4
,
5
,
6
,
7
. In providing the first experimental demonstration of conformity in a wild non-primate, and of cultural norms in foraging techniques in any wild animal, our results suggest a much broader taxonomic occurrence of such an apparently complex cultural behaviour.
Journal Article
The Illusion of Consensus
When evaluating information, we cannot always rely on what has been presented as truth: Different sources might disagree with each other, and sometimes there may be no underlying truth. Accordingly, we must use other cues to evaluate information—perhaps the most salient of which is consensus. But what counts as consensus? Do we attend only to surface-level indications of consensus, or do we also probe deeper and consider why sources agree? Four experiments demonstrated that individuals evaluate consensus only superficially: Participants were equally confident in conclusions drawn from a true consensus (derived from independent primary sources) and a false consensus (derived from only one primary source). This phenomenon was robust, occurring even immediately after participants explicitly stated that a true consensus was more believable than a false consensus. This illusion of consensus reveals a powerful means by which misinformation may spread.
Journal Article
Cultural evolution of conformity and anticonformity
Conformist bias occurs when the probability of adopting a more common cultural variant in a population exceeds its frequency, and anticonformist bias occurs when the reverse is true. Conformist and anticonformist bias have been widely documented in humans, and conformist bias has also been observed in many nonhuman animals. Boyd and Richerson used models of conformist and anticonformist bias to explain the evolution of large-scale cooperation, and subsequent research has extended these models. We revisit Boyd and Richerson’s original analysis and show that, with conformity based on more than three role models, the evolutionary dynamics can be more complex than previously assumed. For example, we show the presence of stable cycles and chaos under strong anticonformity and the presence of new equilibria when both conformity and anticonformity act at different variant frequencies, with and without selection. We also investigate the case of population subdivision with migration and find that the common claim that conformity can maintain between-group differences is not always true. Therefore, the effect of conformity on the evolution of cooperation by group selection may be more complicated than previously stated. Finally, using Feldman and Liberman’s modifier approach, we investigate the conditions under which a rare modifier of the extent of conformity or the number of role models can invade a population. Understanding the dynamics of conformistand anticonformist-biased transmission may have implications for research on human and nonhuman animal behavior, the evolution of cooperation, and frequency-dependent transmission in general.
Journal Article