Impact of contextual and personal determinants on online social conformity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106302Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Individuals conform more to larger majorities than smaller majorities.

  • The presence of minorities or their group sizes do not affect conformity behaviour.

  • Individuals are more likely to conform in objective tasks with a ‘correct’ answer.

  • Individuals with higher self-confidence are less likely to conform to the majority.

  • Individuals with higher conscientiousness and neuroticism are more likely to conform.

Abstract

Despite decades of research concerning social conformity and its effects on face-to-face groups, it is yet to be comprehensively investigated in online contexts. In our work, we investigate the impact of contextual determinants (such as majority group size, the number of opposing minorities and their sizes, and the nature of the task) and personal determinants (such as self-confidence, personality and gender) on online social conformity. In order to achieve this, we deployed an online quiz with subjective and objective multiple-choice questions. For each question, participants provided their answer and self-reported confidence. Following this, they were shown a fabricated bar chart that positioned the participant either in the majority or minority, presenting the distribution of group answers across different answer options. Each question tested a unique group distribution in terms of the number of minorities against the majority and their corresponding group sizes. Subsequently, participants were given the opportunity to change their answer and reported confidence. Upon completing the quiz, participants undertook a personality test and participated in a semi-structured interview. Our results show that 78% of the participants conformed to the majority’s answers at least once during the quiz. Further analysis reveals that the tendency to conform was significantly higher for objective questions, especially when a participant was unsure of their answer and faced an opposing majority with a significant size. While we saw no significant gender differences in conformity, participants with higher conscientiousness and neuroticism tended to conform more frequently than others. We conclude that online social conformity is a function of majority size, nature of the task, self-confidence and certain personality traits.

Introduction

Conformity is a powerful social phenomenon that encourages individuals to change their personal opinions and behaviour to agree with an opposing majority (i.e. the greater proportion of the group members with a contradicting opinion or behaviour) (Asch, 1951). Such behaviour is predominantly visible as we tend to fit in to our social groups, to be ‘liked’ and to be ‘right’ (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). In other words, social conformity can lead to people not expressing their own judgements and opinions when facing peer pressure in groups, which could be detrimental to the effectiveness of groups in decision making and innovative thinking (Kaplan & Miller, 1987).

This psychological mechanism has been widely studied with regard to face-to-face groups, specifically focusing on its diverse contextual and personal determinants. For example, it was observed that when placed in a group setting, the likelihood of an individual conforming to the majority was influenced by various contextual factors such as the size of the majority group (Asch, 1956, Gerard et al., 1968) and the nature and difficulty of the task at hand (i.e. objective tasks with one correct answer or subjective tasks where the answer is based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions) (Blake et al., 1957, Coleman et al., 1958). Moreover, literature suggests that personal factors such as participant gender (Eagly & Chrvala, 1986), self-confidence (Rosenberg, 1963) and personality (Crutchfield, 1955) may also impact susceptibility to social conformity differently.

However, it is unclear to what extent observations resulting from these seminal studies apply to online settings. This is of particularly importance as our social interactions increasingly shift to diverse online paradigms such as discussion forums, social media, polls and learning platforms (Goncalves et al., 2013, Reynolds et al., 2011). As such online groups are inherently dissimilar to face-to-face groups in terms of anonymity and reduced social presence (McKenna & Green, 2002), their susceptibility to social conformity is likely to vary. While existing literature provide some evidence for the presence of conformity in computer-mediated settings (Beran et al., 2015, Cinnirella and Green, 2007, Sharma and De Choudhury, 2018, Sukumaran et al., 2011), and evaluate the effects of several aforementioned factors independently (Laporte et al., 2010, Lowry et al., 2006, Rosander and Eriksson, 2012), they fail to assess the combined effects of such determinants. We argue that understanding the collective impact of such determinants could better explain their relative importance while also rationalising conformity behaviour. Thus, we extend the existing literature by thoroughly exploring possible direct and combined effects of contextual and personal determinants of conformity in anonymous online settings. While online settings differ from face-to-face settings in aspects beyond anonymity (e.g. social presence), we do not investigate aspects of online social interactions beyond anonymity in the current study.

To explore online social conformity as a function of contextual and personal determinants, we deployed an online quiz with multiple-choice questions (MCQs) of objective and subjective nature. Participants first answered each question privately while denoting their self-reported confidence on the selected answer. Next, our software displayed the distribution of votes across the different answer options of the MCQ, as chosen by other participants. Participants were then given the opportunity to change their initial answer and self-reported confidence. We also collected Big-five personality test scores (where personality is identified in terms or openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) (John & Srivastava, 1999), to assess the personality of each participant towards the end of the quiz. Through our study we investigate the following research questions with regard to online social conformity:

RQ1: How do contextual determinants like majority and minority group sizes, number of minorities present and nature of the task impact the likelihood of an individual conforming to the majority’s judgement in an online setting?

RQ2: How do personal determinants like gender, self-confidence and personality impact the likelihood of an individual conforming to the majority’s judgement in an online setting?

Section snippets

Conformity in face-to-face groups

Social conformity was first explored in physical face-to-face groups. Asch’s conformity experiments (Asch, 1951, Asch, 1955) were pivotal among early research on social conformity, where about a third of the participants conformed to a clearly incorrect yet unanimous majority, in a simple line matching task, confirming that individual judgements can be swayed under pressure. A subsequent study by Deutsch and Gerard (1955) rationalised conformity behaviour as having ‘normative’ and

Method

We conducted our experiment as an online quiz with multiple-choice questions (MCQ). MCQ quizzes have been widely utilised in many recent studies related to online social conformity (Beran et al., 2015, Laporte et al., 2010, Rosander and Eriksson, 2012). This methodological decision enabled us to control the independent variables (such as group distributions and question types) to suit the requirements of the experiment, while simulating a plausible real world online environment.

Our experiment

Results

We collected 36 responses from each of the 50 participants (2 training questions and 34 quiz questions). Responses to training questions were removed from the data set prior to analysis, which resulted in 1700 responses. The participants were in a majority in 800 responses and in a minority for in the remaining 900 responses (equally distributed between objective and subjective questions). We highlight that our intention was not to compare results between majority and minority groups, but

Discussion

Our results establish that online social conformity is determined by several contextual and personal determinants. We observed statistically significant relationships between majority group size, nature of the question, self-reported confidence, and certain personality traits on the likelihood of conforming behaviour.

Conclusion

Social conformity is a widely experienced form of social influence, both in face-to-face and online groups, where minorities change their behaviour and opinions to match contrasting opinions of the group majority. While determinants of conformity has been studied in face-to-face groups, it is yet to be thoroughly explored in online group settings. Thus, this work aimed to study both contextual and personal determinants of social conformity and their implications in online environments.

Our

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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