The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change

Mallinson, Daniel J.; Hatemi, Peter K.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0196600

Cited by 38 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 73 publications

(56 reference statements)

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“…Given that men have traditionally held greater power in the USA, conformity might benefit them more (or to put it conversely, conformity may be detrimental to women, and individuals with female-biased GFI). This argument is consistent with the observations that men consistently score higher in social dominance orientation than women (Sidanius et al, 1994), and that conservatives tend to conform more readily than liberals (Sistrunk and Halcomb, 1969;Feldman, 2003;Jost, 2017;Mallinson and Hatemi, 2018).…”

Section: Male Descendant Kin Promote Conservative Views On Gender Issues and Conformity To Traditional Normssupporting

confidence: 90%

Male descendant kin promote conservative views on gender issues and conformity to traditional norms

2021

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Political and social attitudes have been shown to differ by sex in a way that tracks individual self-interest. We propose that these attitudes also change strategically to serve the best interests of either male or female kin. To test this hypothesis, we developed a measure of gendered fitness interests (GFI)-an index which reflects the sex, relatedness, and residual reproductive value of close kin. We predicted that people with male-biased GFI (i.e., people with more male kin of a reproductive age) would have more conservative attitudes towards gender-related issues (e.g., gender roles, women's rights, abortion rights). An online study using an American sample (N = 560) found support for this hypothesis. Further analyses revealed that this relationship was driven not only by people's own sex and reproductive value but also by those of their descendant kin. Exploratory analyses also found a positive association between male-biased GFI and a measure of conformity, as well as a smaller association between male-biased GFI and having voted Republican in the last election. Both these associations were statistically mediated by gender-related conservatism. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that GFI influences socio-political attitudes.

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Section: Male Descendant Kin Promote Conservative Views On Gender Issues and Conformity To Traditional Normssupporting

confidence: 90%

Male descendant kin promote conservative views on gender issues and conformity to traditional norms

2021

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“…Our online experiment also differentiates from the study of conformity in discussions of social issues or in the political discourse. Typically, research in those domains investigate conformity in terms of switching between two mindsets in general (e.g., from a conservative to a liberal mindset, or other way round) (e.g., [23,19]). Potentially the switching direction (e.g., from conservative to liberal), or the loss amount for accepting or discarding a particular single issue associated within the one or the other mindset, may play a similar role in those domains.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conformity Behavior in Group Playlist Creation

Bauer

Ferwerda

2020

Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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A strong research record has evidenced that individuals tend to conform with a group's majority opinion. In contrast to existing literature that investigates conformity to a majority opinion against an objectively correct answer, the originality of our study lies in that we investigate conformity in a subjective context. The emphasis of our analysis lies on the "switching direction" in favor or against an item. In an online experiment, groups of five had to create a music playlist. A song was added to the playlist with an unanimous positive decision only. After seeing the other group members' ratings, participants had the opportunity to revise their own response. Results suggest different behavior for originally favored compared to disliked songs. For favored songs, one negative judgement by another group member was sufficient to induce participants to downvote the song. For disliked songs, in contrast, a majority of positive judgements was needed to induce participants to switch their vote.

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“…To make sure that they have access to other like-minded allies, agents are more likely to choose to belong to communities where their deeply held beliefs are promoted and shared, which limits the cognitive effort that is already expanded in the foraging of information [11]. In-group delivery of information influences how strongly this information is integrated, especially if group membership is important for the individual [14]. This sampling extends beyond other agents, to choice of media and environment.…”

Section: Confirmation Bias and Conformitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

Albarracin¹,

Daphne²,

Ramstead³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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The spread of ideas is a fundamental concern of today’s news ecology. Understanding the dynamics of the spread of information and its co-option by interested parties is of critical importance. Research on this topic has shown that individuals tend to cluster in echo-chambers and are driven by confirmation bias. In this paper, we leverage the active inference framework to provide an in silico model of confirmation bias and its effect on echo-chamber formation. We build a model based on active inference, where agents tend to sample information in order to justify their own view of reality, which eventually leads to them to have a high degree of certainty about their own beliefs. We show that, once agents have reached a certain level of certainty about their beliefs, it becomes very difficult to get them to change their views. This system of self-confirming beliefs is upheld and reinforced by the evolving relationship between agent's beliefs and its observations, which over time will continue to provide evidence for their ingrained ideas about the world. The epistemic communities that are consolidated by these shared beliefs, in turn, tend to produce perceptions of reality that reinforce those shared beliefs. We provide an active inference account of this community formation mechanism. We postulate that agents are driven by the epistemic value that they obtain from sampling or observing the behaviors of other agents. Inspired by digital social networks like Twitter, we build a generative model in which agents generate observable social claims or posts (e.g. `tweets') while reading the socially-observable claims of other agents, that lend support towards one of two mutually-exclusive abstract topics. Agents can choose which other agent they pay attention to at each timestep, and crucially who they attend to and what they choose to read influences their beliefs about the world. Agents also assess their local network’s perspective, influencing which kinds of posts they expect to see other agents making. The model was built and simulated simulated using the freely-available Python package pymdp. The proposed active inference model can reproduce the formation of echo-chambers over social networks, and gives us insight into the cognitive processes that lead to this phenomenon.

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The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change

Cited by 38 publications

References 73 publications

Male descendant kin promote conservative views on gender issues and conformity to traditional norms

Male descendant kin promote conservative views on gender issues and conformity to traditional norms

Conformity Behavior in Group Playlist Creation

Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

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