Different drives of herding: An exploratory study of motivations underlying social conformity

Abstract

We often align our behaviors, attitudes, and opinions in line with a majority of others, a phenomenon known as “social conformity.” A seminal framework has proposed that conformity behaviors are mainly driven by three fundamental motives: a desire to gain more information to be accurate, to obtain social approval from others, and to maintain a favorable self‐concept. However, previous studies usually have interpreted conformity behaviors as driven by one motive or another, largely ignoring the fact that human behaviors could be concurrently induced by multiple and even conflicting motivations. Adopting a typical conformity paradigm widely used in previous studies, we explored distinct and concurrent motives underlying the same conformity behavior, combining personality and individual differences with more nuanced analyses of observed conformity behaviors. Our findings provide novel evidence to show that three motivations exist within a single conformity behavior, suggesting that multiple motivations drive the conformity concurrently. These findings provide a potential solution for the extensive debate about what drives human social conformity and help to better understand the conformity behavior in daily life.

Neural asymmetry in aligning with generous versus selfish descriptive norms in a charitable donation task

“…We attribute this to the fact that the charitable donation task creates a tension between self- and group-interest, making it more difficult for some individuals to decide which norms (selfish or generous) they want to align with, while the anchor at a 50/50 split (priming the injunctive fairness norm) may inhibit other individuals from aligning altogether. Thus the heterogeneity is not surprising and underscores that not all herding behavior is the same 46 . Future studies should further address the role of individual differences, both as precursors of alignment behaviors (predicting the extent to which alignment will, or will not, occur) as well as their modulatory influence on the neural correlates of alignment.…”

“…We also investigated the moderating role of SVO, but found no neural explanation for prosocials’ greater aversion to aligning with selfish norms . Alignment, however, could be the result of many motives besides those predicted by SVO, each one with a distinct pattern of neural activation 46 , 47 . An open question is how, at the neural level, different personalities trade off empirical information with their own notion of what they should do when deciding to align or not.…”

Personality and psychopathological characteristics in functional movement disorders

“…Due to the lack of studies assessing personality with the Rorschach test in patients with FMD, the study sample size was calculated considering the prevalence of PeDs assessed with the SCI-D-II [16]. Assuming an alpha error level of 0.05 and a power of 80%, to reach a significant difference (p<0.005), the minimum number of participants required was 16 in FMD group and 16 in the OND group, for a total of 32 patients.…”

Mindware: Critical Thinking in Everyday Life

“…And emotions can undermine rational thinking when deeply held personal beliefs, such as political and religious views, are challenged (Wexler 2006;Nisbett 2003;Stanovich 2011). Likewise, humans can bow to social pressure, acting or adopting views in response to perceived or real pressure to conform (Asch 1956;Chen et al 2022;Schultz 2022).…”