An event-based account of conformity

Psychological Science
Diana Kim, Bernhard Hommel

Abstract

People often change their behavior and beliefs when confronted with deviating behavior and beliefs of others, but the mechanisms underlying such phenomena of conformity are not well understood. Here we suggest that people cognitively represent their own actions and others' actions in comparable ways (theory of event coding), so that they may fail to distinguish these two categories of actions. If so, other people's actions that have no social meaning should induce conformity effects, especially if those actions are similar to one's own actions. We found that female participants adjusted their manual judgments of the beauty of female faces in the direction consistent with distracting information without any social meaning (numbers falling within the range of the judgment scale) and that this effect was enhanced when the distracting information was presented in movies showing the actual manual decision-making acts. These results confirm that similarity between an observed action and one's own action matters. We also found that the magnitude of the standard conformity effect was statistically equivalent to the movie-induced effect.

References

Jul 14, 1999·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology·T L Chartrand, J A Bargh
Feb 1, 2000·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·S R LangtonI Bruce
Sep 21, 2002·The Behavioral and Brain Sciences·B HommelW Prinz
Jan 28, 2004·Annual Review of Psychology·Robert B Cialdini, Noah J Goldstein
Oct 20, 2004·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Bernhard Hommel
Jan 24, 2008·Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience·Jasmin CloutierWilliam M Kelley
Jan 17, 2009·Neuron·Vasily KlucharevGuillén Fernández
Apr 2, 2009·Psychological Research·Bernhard Hommel
Jun 6, 2009·Psychological Science·Bernhard HommelWery P M van den Wildenberg
Jun 10, 2011·Psychological Science·Jamil ZakiJason P Mitchell
Jun 12, 2012·Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience·Anna ShestakovaVasily Klucharev

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Citations

Oct 13, 2015·Cognition·Veronica Dudarev, Ran R Hassin
Mar 14, 2016·Cognition·Ke MaBernhard Hommel
Oct 7, 2015·Frontiers in Psychology·Bernhard Hommel, Lorenza S Colzato
Aug 8, 2015·Psychological Research·Robert WirthWilfried Kunde
Aug 5, 2015·Personality and Social Psychology Review : an Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc·Eliot R Smith, Diane M Mackie
Feb 21, 2018·Psychological Science·Max Ihmels, Fabian Ache
Dec 19, 2019·Frontiers in Psychology·Diana Kim, Bernhard Hommel
Jun 7, 2019·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Bernhard Hommel
May 9, 2018·Psychological Science·Diana Kim, Bernhard Hommel
Jun 22, 2021·Frontiers in Psychology·Vivica von WeichsGabriele Oettingen
Jul 10, 2021·Psychonomic Bulletin & Review·Bernhard Hommel, Niek Stevenson

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