Week 4 Biological Bases of Conformity Discussion

Wk 4

During this week, we are examining why most people tend to conform in most of their social interactions, while others deviate from the existing social norms. After you have read the textbook and lectures assigned for this week, please respond to the following questions:

In your everyday life, you conform to hundreds of norms, rules, and laws, often without your conscious aware that you are doing so. There are several factors that influence conformity and obedience. What are some of the biological, social, and environmental factors regarding conformity? In your opinion, what is the basis for continued compliance?

If you were a participant in the Asch Research study, do you feel you would have conformed? Why or why not?

• To what extent do you consider yourself to be a conformist? Why is it necessary for a group to require some degree of conformity from its members?
• Part II
• Assignment Overview

For this assignment, you will have the opportunity to understand and explore deviant behavior. In a 2-3 page essay (12-point font) essay, respond to these questions:

Drawing upon the theories of deviance presented in the text, describe something that your parents’ generation considered to be deviant in their lifetime but is no longer considered deviant in mainstream contemporary American society, or something that is deviant in contemporary society but was not considered deviant in the past.

Using the same example, consider whether other cultures/subcultures did/would now consider the act to be deviant.

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Humans are characterized by an extreme dependence on culturally transmitted information and recent formal theory predicts that natural selection should favor adaptive learning strategies that facilitate effective copying and decision making. One strategy that has attracted particular attention is conformist transmission, defined as the disproportionately likely adoption of the most common variant. Conformity has historically been emphasized as significant in the social psychology literature, and recently there have also been reports of conformist behavior in non-human animals. However, mathematical analyses differ in how important and widespread they expect conformity to be, and relevant experimental work is scarce, and generates findings that are both mutually contradictory and inconsistent with the predictions of the models. We review the relevant literature considering the causation, function, history, and ontogeny of conformity, and describe a computer-based experiment on human subjects that we carried out in order to resolve ambiguities. We found that only when many demonstrators were available and subjects were uncertain was subject behavior conformist. A further analysis found that the underlying response to social information alone was generally conformist. Thus, our data are consistent with a conformist use of social information, but as subjects’ behavior is the result of both social and asocial influences, the resultant behavior may not be conformist. We end by relating these findings to an embryonic cognitive neuroscience literature that has recently begun to explore the neural bases of social learning. Here conformist transmission may be a particularly useful case study, not only because there are well-defined and tractable opportunities to characterize the biological underpinnings of this form of social learning, but also because early findings imply that humans may possess specific cognitive adaptations for effective social learning.

In 1963, ethologist Niko Tinbergen argued that to fully understand behavior in biology it is necessary to consider it from four different perspectives, that of its history, ontogeny, function, and causation. Whilst heuristics such of these have the potential to constrain research as much as assist it (Laland et al., 2011a) the realization of answers to Tinbergen’s four questions is often a very helpful target for research, encouraging a broad perspective on behavior, and fostering interdisciplinary approaches. Here we focus on behavioral conformity, a topic that has received considerable attention from at least three of these perspectives. Below we summarize insights into conformity derived from social and developmental psychology, cultural evolution modeling and experimentation, animal social learning, and cognitive neuroscience. As the approaches of these fields do not map cleanly onto Tinbergen’s questions, we organize our analysis on a disciplinary basis, but draw attention to which of Tinbergen’s questions is being addressed in each case. We conclude that the study of conformity has been hampered by definitional inconsistency and experimental limitations and recognize the need for a more comprehensive theoretical framework if researchers are to progress toward a common understanding that spans these diverse fields.

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