Conformity to popular, not average, opinions: Models, data, and evolution

What is it about?

A continuous trait contains infinitely many variants on a spectrum, such as a spectrum of behaviors or ideologies. "Conformity" to such traits has been defined as the preference for the mean variant, even if this mean is not close to any individual variant (e.g., if half of the population falls on the far right and far left of a spectrum, respectively, the mean is in the center). Here, we define conformity as the preference for clusters of common variants, not average variants. Compared to trait-averaging models, this conformity model provides a better fit to empirical data on human decision-making under many conditions, and in simulations, it often produces different population-level outcomes such as faster shifts toward poles of a spectrum.

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Photo by David Rotimi on Unsplash

Photo by David Rotimi on Unsplash