Majority influence in children and other animals

Abstract

We here review existing evidence for majority influences in children under the age of ten years and comparable studies with animals ranging from fish to apes. Throughout the review, we structure the discussion surrounding majority influences by differentiating the behaviour of individuals in the presence of a majority and the underlying mechanisms and motivations. Most of the relevant research to date in both developmental psychology and comparative psychology has focused on the behavioural outcomes, where a multitude of mechanisms could be at play. We further propose that interpreting cross-species differences in behavioural patterns is difficult without considering the psychology of the individual. Some attempts at this have been made both in developmental psychology and comparative psychology. We propose that physiological measures should be used to subsidize behavioural studies in an attempt to understand the composition of mechanisms and motivations underlying majority influence. We synthesize the relevant evidence on human brain function in order to provide a framework for future investigation in this area. In addition to streamlining future research efforts, we aim to create a conceptual platform for productive exchanges across the related disciplines of developmental and comparative psychology.

Conformity without majority? The case for demarcating social from majority influences

“…A similar finding was reported by Whiten (1998): in this study, chimpanzees preferentially used their first-learned action pattern that had been demonstrated to them by one human experimenter, even after discovering that other sequences worked equally well (Whiten, 1998). These observations suggest that chimpanzees remain faithful to what they have learned first, or socially, and that these characteristics, not majority influences, can sufficiently account for the information diffusion and the reversion pattern that form the foundation of the conformity interpretation in primates (also see Hrubesch et al, 2009;Pesendorfer et al, 2009;van Leeuwen & Haun, 2013).…”

“…the reluctance to switch techniques once one technique has been proficiently mastered; Hrubesch, Preuschoft, & van Schaik, 2009;van Leeuwen, Cronin, Schütte, Call, & Haun, 2013;van Leeuwen & Haun, 2013;Pesendorfer et al, 2009). In that case, the reconvergence to the majority behaviour might not even be socially mediated (see van Leeuwen & Haun, 2013).…”

“…in this case it could be argued that an established behaviour needs to be discarded). However, in these reversion studies, where subjects reconverged on the majority strategy after exploring an alternative strategy, it remained unexplored whether the reverting individuals had had the chance to actually observe the majority and questionable to what extent reverting back to the first-learned strategy entails forgoing individually acquired behaviour (see van Leeuwen & Haun, 2013). Moreover, a recent study found that chimpanzees who perceived a majority of group members engaging in a different (yet equally effortful and rewarding) strategy from themselves did not adjust their behaviour to the majority (van Leeuwen et al, 2013).…”

A reappreciation of ‘conformity’

“…Here, we respond to Whiten & van de Waal, (this issue) by (1) discussing how their arguments against our alternative explanations for their conformity interpretation (as advanced in van de Waal et al, 2013) may be misguided, (2) defending the position that their correlation between the 'majority of individuals' and the 'majority of behaviours' is tangential to the current debate, (3) presenting evidence in favour of our original suggestion to keep reliance on the 'majority of individuals' and the 'majority of behaviours' as two separate learning biases, and (4) realigning the debate between Aplin et al (2015a) and van Leeuwen et al (2015) to focus again on animals' observation records as prerequisite knowledge to interpret their behavioural decisions in terms of learning biases. match alternatives exhibited by a majority of others' (also see Haun, van Leeuwen, & Edelson, 2013). In their original study (van de Waal et al, 2013), male vervet monkeys that were trained to prefer one of two food colours in their native group immigrated to a new group where the alternative food colour was preferred and adjusted their preferences accordingly (except for one high-ranking male who maintained his native preference).…”

How preschoolers react to norm violations is associated with culture

“…Previous research has illustrated that cultural in-group homogeneity is promoted by majority behaviors, conformity and hyper-conformity to the most common behavior (Boyd & Richerson, 2009;Efferson, Lalive, Richerson, Mcelreath, & Lubell, 2008;Flynn & Whiten, 2008;Haun, van Leeuwen, & Edelson, 2013;Joe Henrich & Boyd, 1998;Whiten & Flynn, 2010). For this reason, we deviate from hierarchical coding procedures in the field of norm enforcement (e.g.…”