Conformity is an important aspect of social behavior. Two main motives have been identified: people may adapt their behavior to "play nice" despite knowing better (normative conformity) or they may accept the others' opinion as a valid source of information (informative conformity). Neuroimaging studies can help to distinguish between these two possibilities. Here, we present a functional magne...

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...