Abstract
The descriptive norm effect refers to findings that individuals will tend to prefer behaving certain ways when they know that other people behave similarly. An open question is whether individuals will still conform to other people’s behaviour when they do not identify with these other people, such as a Democrat being biased towards following a popular behaviour amongst Republicans. Self-categorization theory makes the intuitive prediction that people will actively avoid conforming to the norms of groups with which they do not identify. We tested this by informing participants that a particular action was more popular amongst people they identified with and additionally informed some participants that this action was unpopular amongst people they did not identify with. Specifically, we presented descriptive norms of people who supported different political parties or had opposing stances on important social issues. Counter to self-categorization theory’s prediction, we found that informing participants that an action was unpopular amongst people they did not identify with led participants’ preferences to shift away from that action. These results suggest that a general desire to conform with others may outpower the common ingroup vs outgroup mentality.
Highlights
Our choices and judgements are influenced by the choices and judgements of other people [1, 2]
37 participants were excluded from the analysis for either failing the understanding check (n = 23) and/or rating their attitude towards their chosen social issue as neutral (n = 14)
We found evidence against this; participants shifted their preferences away from an option that was popular with an ingroup when they were presented with an outgroup descriptive norm that favoured the alternative option. This was found even though ingroups and outgroups were defined based on political identity or social issues that participants themselves indicated that they personally cared strongly about
Summary
Our choices and judgements are influenced by the choices and judgements of other people [1, 2]. We tend to prefer to behave in certain ways when we know that most other people behave that way. This descriptive norm effect has been successfully used to encourage various prosocial behaviours such as decreasing tax evasion [3], decreasing energy use [4] and increasing organ donor registrations [5], though they can encourage anti-social behaviour such as corruption [6, 7], even in the presence of strong moral pressures against the behaviour [8]. In an effort to maintain a personal sense of ingroup identity, self-categorization theory proposes that
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