Strategic Conformity or Anti-Conformity to Avoid Punishment and Attract Reward

Abstract

We provide systematic insights on strategic conformist – as well as anticonformist – behavior in situations where people are evaluated, i.e., where an individual has to be selected for reward (e.g., promotion) or punishment (e.g., layoffs). To affect the probability of being selected, people may attempt to fit in or stand out in order to affect the chances of being noticed or liked by the evaluator. We investigate such strategic incentives for conformity or anticonformity experimentally in three different domains: facts, taste, and creativity. To distinguish conformity and anticonformity from independence, we introduce a new experimental design that allows us to predict participants’ independent choices based on transitivity. We find that the prospect of punishment increases conformity, while the prospect of reward reduces it. Anticonformity emerges in the prospect of reward, but only under specific circumstances. Similarity-based selection (i.e., homophily) is much more important for the evaluators’ decisions than salience. We also employ a theoretical approach to illustrate strategic key mechanisms of our experimental setting.