Impact of contextual and personal determinants on online social conformity

Effect of Conformity on Perceived Trustworthiness of News in Social Media

“…Moreover, we note that participants were more likely to adopt the majority's opinion on an article's credibility as the number of comments reflecting the majority's sentiment (or the majority's size) increased. This is inline with observations from previous studies on online conformity [10], [11], [12]. More interestingly, the influence of the majority's size on participant conformity was higher when the majority was critical of an article's trustworthiness, than when the majority was supportive.…”

“…Furthermore, the above results were compared with an article consisting of supportive comments as well as a disclaimer alerting participants that the article might actually be fake, which did not lower participants' attitude or their likelihood to comment and share the post. The author concluded that comments from other users are more influential than a disclaimer from a social media platform, due to effects of 'social conformity', i.e., the human tendency to adjust personal opinions to agree with a group majority, seeking social approval (normative conformity) or presuming the majority to be 'correct' in uncertain situations (informational conformity) [10], [11], [12]. While Colliander's study established the influence of conformity to user comments on a Facebook news article, it only investigated conformity in the presence of unanimously critical or supportive comments, while in reality a news article could have a combination of supportive and critical comments (e.g., a majority of supportive comments vs. a minority of critical comments and vice versa).…”

“…While Colliander's study established the influence of conformity to user comments on a Facebook news article, it only investigated conformity in the presence of unanimously critical or supportive comments, while in reality a news article could have a combination of supportive and critical comments (e.g., a majority of supportive comments vs. a minority of critical comments and vice versa). This is especially crucial as literature strongly emphasises on the effect of majority -minority group compositions on con-formity behaviour [10], [11], [12]. Furthermore, conforming to user comments could also depend on personal determinants of users such as their self-confidence [10], [11], [12], familiarity with the news article, gender, age and time spent on social media which are yet to be investigated.…”

“…This is especially crucial as literature strongly emphasises on the effect of majority -minority group compositions on con-formity behaviour [10], [11], [12]. Furthermore, conforming to user comments could also depend on personal determinants of users such as their self-confidence [10], [11], [12], familiarity with the news article, gender, age and time spent on social media which are yet to be investigated.…”

Modulating the Activity of vmPFC Regulates Informational Social Conformity: A tDCS Study

“…In addition, more than one-third of the participants in the cathodal and sham groups thought that they did not perform as well as others, and few people in the anodal group thought the same way. From this, we may speculate that an individual's subjective confidence level may be a reason for the different conformity tendencies, which is consistent with the findings of several recent studies (Mahmoodi et al, 2019;Wijenayake et al, 2020). Finally, we found that participants made more decisions consistent with the majority when they were informed of the right majority responses than the wrong majority responses, even though the participants did not actually know the correctness of the majority responses.…”