Abstract
How much do our choices represent stable inner preferences versus social conformity? We examine conformity and consistency in sartorial choices surrounding a common life event of new norm exposure: relocation. A large-scale dataset of individual purchases of women’s shoes (16,236 transactions) across five years and 2,007 women reveals a balance of conformity and consistency, moderated by changes in location socioeconomic status. Women conform to new local norms (i.e., average heel size) when moving to relatively higher status locations, but mostly ignore new local norms when moving to relatively lower status locations. In short, at periods of transition, it is the fashion norms of the rich that trickle down to consumers. These analyses provide the first naturalistic large-scale demonstration of the tension between psychological conformity and consistency, with real decisions in a highly visible context.
Highlights
Conformity is undoubtedly a robust psychological phenomenon, but classic laboratory studies [1, 2] have difficulty speaking to the subtle variations we experience in everyday life
Does purchase behavior after moving reflect conformity to the new location or consistency with their past behavior? To address this question, we ran a series of mixed model regressions with random intercepts for individual, move number, origin location, and destination location predicting own average heel size purchased in the destination location (Table 2)
Origin location and destination location random effects allow us to control for any variation in the general nature of the locations that we could not observe with region level data (e.g. New York City’s cutting edge fashion scene vs. Topeka, Kansas’ more conservative approach to fashion)
Summary
Conformity is undoubtedly a robust psychological phenomenon, but classic laboratory studies [1, 2] have difficulty speaking to the subtle variations we experience in everyday life. Qualitative and quantitative investigations into everyday conformity [3,4,5,6]—while informative—involve small sample sizes, specific locations, and external interventions, leaving open questions about large-scale endogenous conformity. Even recent large-scale network analyses of “spreading” tastes are often difficult to generalize beyond specific closed networks [7], leaving open questions about transitions between social networks. To overcome the challenges of past research on everyday conformity, we examine changing preferences within a large dataset of real purchase behavior, obtained from an online retailer of luxury clothing brands. Provide a convenient test case for how conformity plays out in real life.
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