The Biological Bases of Conformity

Abstract

Humans are characterized by an extreme dependence on culturally transmitted information and recent formal theory predicts that natural selection should favor adaptive learning strategies that facilitate effective copying and decision making. One strategy that has attracted particular attention is conformist transmission, defined as the disproportionately likely adoption of the most common variant. Conformity has historically been emphasized as significant in the social psychology literature, and recently there have also been reports of conformist behavior in non-human animals. However, mathematical analyses differ in how important and widespread they expect conformity to be, and relevant experimental work is scarce, and generates findings that are both mutually contradictory and inconsistent with the predictions of the models. We review the relevant literature considering the causation, function, history, and ontogeny of conformity, and describe a computer-based experiment on human subjects that we carried out in order to resolve ambiguities. We found that only when many demonstrators were available and subjects were uncertain was subject behavior conformist. A further analysis found that the underlying response to social information alone was generally conformist. Thus, our data are consistent with a conformist use of social information, but as subjects’ behavior is the result of both social and asocial influences, the resultant behavior may not be conformist. We end by relating these findings to an embryonic cognitive neuroscience literature that has recently begun to explore the neural bases of social learning. Here conformist transmission may be a particularly useful case study, not only because there are well-defined and tractable opportunities to characterize the biological underpinnings of this form of social learning, but also because early findings imply that humans may possess specific cognitive adaptations for effective social learning.

A reappreciation of ‘conformity’

“…Note that this set-up reflects the scenario in which conformist transmission is typically studied (e.g. Boyd & Richerson, 1985;Henrich & Boyd, 1998;van Leeuwen & Haun, 2014;Morgan & Laland, 2012). The guiding copying mechanism is exactly the same as in the previous model, i.e.…”

The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins

“…If individuals preferentially associate with those who behave similarly [20][21][22] (figure 1a(iii)) and behaviour has a cultural element, then elements of social structure may reflect culture. This may especially be the case when conformism homogenizes behaviour though social learning [23], and/or when cultural symbols are used to mark social entities [24] (figure 1a(vi)).…”

“…In the social context, we get emergent structures if individuals associate primarily with individuals with whom they share behaviour, and learn behaviour primarily from their social associates [22,32,33] ( figure 1b(x)). Finally, interplay between social structure and transmission dynamics closes this cycle (figure 1b(xii)), since behaviour defines the cultural context, with its norms and transmission biases, that influences how individuals behave and interact [5,12,23,24].…”

Frequency-dependent female genital cutting behaviour confers evolutionary fitness benefits

“…Positive frequencydependent transmission is a well-established mechanism of social learning in which the probability that an individual adopts a behaviour depends on how common the behaviour is within a relevant group 20,21 . Conformity bias is a subset of positive frequency-dependent biases, where individuals are disproportionately likely to acquire the most common behaviour 22 . It often used as an explanation for the spread of neutral or maladaptive behaviours, as behaviours are adopted based on frequency without evaluation of merit.…”