Incentives for Conformity and Anticonformity

Abstract

We study how social evaluation affects conformity and anticonformity in theory and in an experiment. In theory, we show that negative social evaluation, i.e., potential punishment, creates incentives for conformity. Positive social evaluation, i.e., potential reward, creates incentives for anticonformity. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate the effect of these incentives in three domains: judgments in the knowledge domain, subjective arts preferences, and decisions in a creativity-related task. We rely on a new design in which we compare choices under social influence with predictions based on choices without social influence using transitivity. The experimental results confirm the theoretical predictions.