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Frequency of behavior witnessed and conformity in an everyday social context

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cladiere2014ponee99874.pdf (689.2Kb)
Date
20/06/2014
Author
Claidière, N.
Bowler, M.
Brookes, S.
Brown, R.
Whiten, A.
Funder
The Wellcome Trust
Grant ID
094440/Z/10/Z
Keywords
BF Psychology
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Abstract
Conformity is thought to be an important force in human evolution because it has the potential to stabilize cultural homogeneity within groups and cultural diversity between groups. However, the effects of such conformity on cultural and biological evolution will depend much on the particular way in which individuals are influenced by the frequency of alternative behavioral options they witness. In a previous study we found that in a natural situation people displayed a tendency to be 'linear-conformist'. When visitors to a Zoo exhibit were invited to write or draw answers to questions on cards to win a small prize and we manipulated the proportion of text versus drawings on display, we found a strong and significant effect of the proportion of text displayed on the proportion of text in the answers, a conformist effect that was largely linear with a small non-linear component. However, although this overall effect is important to understand cultural evolution, it might mask a greater diversity of behavioral responses shaped by variables such as age, sex, social environment and attention of the participants. Accordingly we performed a further study explicitly to analyze the effects of these variables, together with the quality of the information participants' responses made available to further visitors. Results again showed a largely linear conformity effect that varied little with the variables analyzed.
Citation
Claidière , N , Bowler , M , Brookes , S , Brown , R & Whiten , A 2014 , ' Frequency of behavior witnessed and conformity in an everyday social context ' , PLoS ONE , vol. 9 , no. 6 , e99874 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099874
Publication
PLoS ONE
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099874
ISSN
1932-6203
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2014 Claidire et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5024

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