Conformity

Your best friends invite you to a music festival with their favorite artists. After looking through the lineup, you realize you are not familiar with the artists playing. You decide to listen to their songs in the hope that you might like them, but can’t help but notice you aren’t a fan of this genre of music. Despite your differing tastes, you convince yourself it’s not bad. In fact, you tell yourself, “It’s pretty good!” At the end of the day, you don’t want to be left out. Ultimately, you temporarily conform to your friends' music tastes, buy a ticket and join them at the festival.

Conformity refers to an individual aligning their behavior, perception, or opinion with those of another person or group.¹ An individual may consciously or unconsciously act in a certain way due to influence from others. We naturally tend to unconsciously mirror the behaviors of those we interact with, such as language, gestures, and talking speed.² We typically use descriptive norms, or perceptions of what most people do in a given situation, to guide our behaviors and actions. If you've ever been in a new or unfamiliar situation, you may have taken cues from other people to understand what proper behavior is in that context. Researchers say that mimicking individuals can subconsciously increase our connection to those we interact with, allowing interactions to flow more effortlessly.³

There are two main explanations provided by social psychology for conformity¹:

• Informational conformity refers to an individual aligning with the view of others as a result of an assumption that others hold knowledge about a situation or topic.
• Normative conformity refers to an individual giving in to the expectations or opinions of others, such as friends or co-workers, in an effort to be liked or accepted.

Part of the prevalence of conformity in human behavior can be explained by reinforcement learning.¹ Being liked or accepted by a certain group is, in itself, a reward.