Are people really conformist-biased? An empirical test and a new mathematical model

Eriksson, Kimmo; Coultas, Julie

doi:10.1556/jep.7.2009.1.3

Cited by 56 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This is consistent with research on conformity where perceived consensus has been found to play an important role (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). Thus, it is typically not sufficient that a behavior is in moderate majority for spontaneous conformity to be elicited (Claidière & Whiten, 2012;Eriksson & Coultas, 2009). The effects of different degrees of commonness on the common-moral association should be similarly investigated.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Bidirectional associations between descriptive and injunctive norms

Eriksson

Strimling

Coultas

2015

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

163

112

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Bidirectional associations between descriptive and injunctive norms

Eriksson

Strimling

Coultas

2015

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

163

112

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“…refs 10,11,34,39 and 40), we wonder whether we have, at the moment, strong support for the existence of conformist transmission at all. The conjecture that conformist bias as individual-level mechanism might not play an important role in the real lives of individuals is supported by recent critiques on the most promising accounts of conformity in non-human animals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Conformity cannot be identified based on population-level signatures

Acerbi

Leeuwen

Haun

et al. 2016

Sci Rep

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Conformist transmission, defined as a disproportionate likelihood to copy the majority, is considered a potent mechanism underlying the emergence and stabilization of cultural diversity. However, ambiguity within and across disciplines remains as to how to identify conformist transmission empirically. In most studies, a population level outcome has been taken as the benchmark to evidence conformist transmission: a sigmoidal relation between individuals’ probability to copy the majority and the proportional majority size. Using an individual-based model, we show that, under ecologically plausible conditions, this sigmoidal relation can also be detected without equipping individuals with a conformist bias. Situations in which individuals copy randomly from a fixed subset of demonstrators in the population, or in which they have a preference for one of the possible variants, yield similar sigmoidal patterns as a conformist bias would. Our findings warrant a revisiting of studies that base their conformist transmission conclusions solely on the sigmoidal curve. More generally, our results indicate that population level outcomes interpreted as conformist transmission could potentially be explained by other individual-level strategies, and that more empirical support is needed to prove the existence of an individual-level conformist bias in human and other animals.

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“…We suspect the stronger biases in Experiment 1 resulted from having multiple options at play. Two past experiments suggested no conformist bias (Coultas, 2004;Eriksson & Coultas, 2009). These studies differed from our results in at least two critical ways making them difficult to compare.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

The when and who of social learning and conformist transmission

Muthukrishna

Morgan

Henrich

2016

Evolution and Human Behavior

163

144

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Formal evolutionary models predict when individuals' rely on social learning over individual learning and the relative strength of their conformist social learning biases. Here we use both treatment effects and individual variation to test predictions about the impact of (1) the number of traits in an environment, (2) the adaptive or payoff relevance of those traits, (3) the fidelity of transmission, and (4) the size of groups. We find that both social learning and the strength of conformist transmission increases with the number of traits, the adaptive value of those traits, and the fidelity of transmission. The strength of conformist transmission increases with group size, but only when there were 2 traits in the environment. Using individual-level variation and recognizing that treatment effects predictably impact individuals differently, we show that IQ negatively predicts social learning, but has a U-shaped relationship to conformist transmission, suggesting strategic use of conformist-biased social learning among those with the highest IQ. Other plausible predictors, such as status, cultural background, and personality, were not predictive. Broadly, our results reveal that not only is the conformist transmission bias ubiquitous, but that past experiments, both human and non-human, have likely underestimated its prevalence and the prevalence of social learning by restricting designs to only 2 traits.

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Are people really conformist-biased? An empirical test and a new mathematical model

Cited by 56 publications

References 22 publications

Bidirectional associations between descriptive and injunctive norms

Bidirectional associations between descriptive and injunctive norms

Conformity cannot be identified based on population-level signatures

The when and who of social learning and conformist transmission

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