Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we analyze a network epistemology model in which agents, all else being equal, prefer to take actions that conform with those of their neighbors. This preference for conformity interacts with the agents’ beliefs about which...

The aim of this note is to investigate a very general problem of (radical) interpretation in terms of a simple coordination game: the conformity game. We show how, within our mathematical framework, the solution concept for the conformity game does indeed provide an algorithmic procedure facilitating triangulation, in the sense of Davidson.

Solomon Asch set out to study social influences and how social forces affect a person’s opinions and attitudes when he began his conformity study in the 1950’s (Hock, 2005). After studying the works of Jean Martin Charcot, and subsequent psychologists, Asch noted that participants in these past studies often changed their differing opinions to those of the majorities, when confronted with oppos...

BACKGROUND Conformity is a psychological variable related to the propensity of an individual to match his or her behavior and opinion to the perceived social and cultural norm, even if these do not represent the true beliefs of the person. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the psychological variable of conformity is different in two distinct modes of renal replacement ther...

We present a model of opinion formation where individuals repeatedly engage in discussion and update their opinion in a social network similarly to the DeGroot model. Abstracting from the standard assumption that individuals always report their opinion truthfully, agents in our model interact strategically in the discussion such that their stated opinion can differ from their true opinion. The ...

Is the variety of products supplied in markets a reflection of the diversity of consumers’ preferences? In this paper, we argue that the distribution of durable goods offered in markets tends to be compressed relative to the distribution of consumers’ underlying preferences. In particular, there are strong incentives for conformity in markets for durable goods. The reason for conformity is natu...

Patterns of conforming behavior were compared for Ss empirically contrasted as conservatives, moderates, or liberals on a politically based Thurstone-type scale. In a split-plot factorial analysis-ofvariance design, liberalism-conservatism of the Ss and political identification of the influence sources were employed as between-Ss variables, while task difficulty opera ted as a within·Ss variabl...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used in this study to explore the neural mechanism of obedience and conformity on the model of online book purchasing. Participants were asked to decide as quickly as possible whether to buy a book based on limited information including its title, keywords and number of positive and negative reviews. Obedience was induced by forcing participants to buy books...

When presented with responses of another person, people incorporate these responses into memory reports: a finding termed memory conformity. Research on memory conformity in recognition reveals that people rely on external social cues to guide their memory responses when their own ability to respond is at chance. In this way, conforming to a reliable source boosts recognition performance but co...