Abstract
Extant research shows that social pressures influence acts of political participation, such as turning out to vote. However, we know less about how conformity pressures affect one’s deeply held political values and opinions. Using a discussion-based experiment, we untangle the unique and combined effects of information and social pressure on a political opinion that is highly salient, politically charged, and part of one’s identity. We find that while information plays a role in changing a person’s opinion, the social delivery of that information has the greatest effect. Thirty three percent of individuals in our treatment condition change their opinion due to the social delivery of information, while ten percent respond only to social pressure and ten percent respond only to information. Participants that change their opinion due to social pressure in our experiment are more conservative politically, conscientious, and neurotic than those that did not.
Highlights
Information and persuasion are perhaps the most important drivers of opinion and behavioral changes
We assessed participants’ privately-held opinions, absent the group, before and Information, social conformity, and opinion change after the treatment in order to determine whether those who expressed a change in opinion during the discussion only did so verbally in order to comply with the group and gain acceptance or if they privately accepted the group’s opinion and truly updated their own values
The firing provided an ideal topic of discussion and a hard test of conformity pressure given the fact that it exhibited high salience on campus, was politically charged, and connected to the participants’ identities as Penn State students
Summary
Information and persuasion are perhaps the most important drivers of opinion and behavioral changes. Far less attention has been given to the role of social pressure in opinion change on politically-charged topics This lacuna is important because humans have a demonstrated proclivity to conform to their peers when faced with social pressure. Individuals conform based on a desire to be liked by others, which Asch [1, 2] called compliance (i.e., going along with the majority even if you do not accept their beliefs because you want to be accepted), or a desire to be right, which Sherif et al [3] termed private acceptance (i.e., believing that the opinions of others may be more correct or informed than their own).
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