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correspondence in form, manner, or character : agreement; an act or instance of conforming; action in accordance with some specified standard or authority... See the full definition

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The Japanese have a saying, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." In other words, act like other people, don't show off, or else.

These forms of social pressure are particularly pronounced in hierarchical cultures, as in East Asia, where people are supposed to know their place, and in small towns, where everyone interacts regularly with everyone else. But they exist to a greater or lesser extent in all cultures.

When you think about it, it becomes clear that pressures to conform are a universal feature of culture. After all, the very idea of a culture implies that people think, feel, and act similarly-otherwise no common content would exist. And since there is no reason for this similarity to arise spontaneously, social mechanisms must exist to create it.

External force is unpleasant, and people don't like it, so while it may always be lurking in the background, cultures are more effective at maintaining and propagating themselves when they can get individuals to want to conform and to want to make others conform as well.

Because humans are social animals who live in groups and have a protracted period of learning the ways of the world, they internalize social norms and folk beliefs, including religion, before it occurs to them to ask critical questions. This is why it is said that, "You can't choose your culture. Your culture chooses you." For example, you grow up speaking a language and learning the implicit social rules and meanings that are built into its vocabulary and grammar. So the acquisition of culture occurs before children have the intellectual power to ask pointed questions

Here, for example, from Wikipedia are the ten rules of the Scandinavian implicit code of conduct known as the Law of Jante (named for a small Danish town in a novel):

1. You're not to think you are anything special.

2. You're not to think you are as good as us.

3. You're not to think you are smarter than us.

4. You're not to convince yourself that you are better than us.

5. You're not to think you know more than us.

6. You're not to think you are more important than us.

7. You're not to think you are good at anything.

8. You're not to laugh at us.

9. You're not to think anyone cares about you.

10. You're not to think you can teach us anything.

And here is another example from my own personal experience. When people ask me how I am feeling, it is difficult for me to say, "Great in every way!" I'm much more comfortable with an answer like "OK" or "Not bad."

Where did this tendency come from? As with other cultural traits, it may appear at first as an aspect of personality-an expression of individual uniqueness rather than behavior shared by a larger group. I think it is a vestige of beliefs about the evil eye that my Eastern European Jewish grandparents brought with them to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century-stronger in my parents than in me, and absent in my daughter

The Eastern European Jewish version of the evil eye inhibits the spontaneous expression of emotion. Its primary effect is to keep individuals from boasting about their good luck, health, possessions, or children. In doing so, it avoids provoking envy in others, and thereby promotes harmony within the larger group

Culture is a mixed bag. It offers individuals closeness, mutual support, a sense of identity, and many other advantages; but these advantages come at a price.

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The Japanese have a saying, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." In other words, act like other people, don't show off, or else. These forms of social pressure are particularly pronounced in hierarchical cultures, as in East Asia, where people are supposed to know their place, and in small towns, where everyone interacts regularly with everyone else.

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Abstract

The development of closer ties between researchers and practitioners in the domain of behavior and behavioral change offers useful opportunities for better informing public policy campaigns via a deeper understanding of the psychological processes that operate in real-world decision-making. Here, we focus on the domain of social conformity, and suggest that the recent emergence of laboratory work using neuroscientific techniques to probe the brain basis of social influence can prove a useful source of data to better inform models of conformity. In particular, we argue that this work can have an important role to play in better understanding the specific mechanisms at work in social conformity, in both validating and extending current psychological theories of this process, and in assessing how behavioral change can take place as a result of exposure to the judgments of others. We conclude by outlining some promising future directions in this domain, and indicating how this research could potentially be usefully applied to policy issues.

Keywords: social conformity, decision making, policy implications, functional magnetic resonance imaging, behavioral change

Introduction

Recent innovative work in applied psychology has established that making people aware of the behavior of others is a useful technique for inducing positive behavioral change on a societal level. For example, taxpayers are more likely to pay what they owe when knowing that others do (Coleman, 2007; Cabinet Office UK Behavioural Insights Team, 2012), householders decrease their energy use when informed that they use more power than their neighbors (Schultz et al., 2007; Slemrod and Allcott, 2011), and people are more likely to give to a charity if it is viewed as the social norm (Alpizar et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2015). Many of these strategies have been successfully applied in recent years, albeit on a somewhat ad hoc basis. However, a better understanding of the mechanisms of social influence and conformity, both cognitively and neurally, is important in extending these techniques into other domains of interest to policy-makers.

Over the course of the last decade, a growing body of work has examined the neurocognitive correlates of social influence (for reviews see Falk et al., 2012; Morgan and Laland, 2012; Izuma, 2013; Schnuerch and Gibbons, 2014; Cascio et al., 2015). These studies have focused on diverse aspects of social influence, ranging from how the opinion of others affects the valuation and perception of simple stimuli (Berns et al., 2005; Mason et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2012; Stallen et al., 2013; Tomlin et al., 2013; Trautmann-Lengsfeld and Herrmann, 2013) to more complex, realistic, choice options (Klucharev et al., 2009; Berns et al., 2010; Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010; Zaki et al., 2011; Huber et al., 2015), and finally, to what brain mechanisms underlie long-term conformity, how the mere presence of peers impacts brain activity and leads to changes in risk-taking and trust decisions (Steinberg, 2007; Chein et al., 2011; Fareri et al., 2012, 2015), and how the brain reconciles misleading influence (Edelson et al., 2011, 2014; Izuma, 2013). The goal of this Focused Review is not to re-summarize this work, but rather to explore to what extent these neuroimaging studies can contribute to our understanding of the psychology of social influence, and what promising directions lie ahead in the future. Specifically, while social influence is a broad term describing the impact of others on our behavior and opinions, we here focus on studies on conformity, with conformity referring to the actual alignment of people's opinions or behaviors with those of others. This review is structured around three ways in which neuroimaging has been suggested to contribute to psychology (Moran and Zaki, 2013), namely the role of neuroimaging in (i) identifying the fundamental mechanisms that underlie behavior, (ii) dissociating between psychological theories that make similar behavioral predictions, and (iii) using brain activity to predict subsequent behavioral change.

KEY CONCEPT 1

The influence of others on our attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. Social influence can take many forms, including conformity (see Key concept 2), reactance (deliberately adopting a view contrary to that of others), persuasion (changing one's view based on appeals to reason or emotion), and minority influence (when an individual or small group exerts influence on the majority).

KEY CONCEPT 2

Aligning one's attitude, opinion or behavior to those of others. Social psychology distinguishes between two reasons for conformity. Informational conformity occurs when one adopts the view of others because others are assumed to possess more knowledge about the situation. Normative conformity refers to the act of conforming to the positive expectations of others in order to be liked and accepted by them.

Mechanisms of conformity

A growing number of neuroscientific studies suggest that conformity recruits neural signals that are similar to those involved in reinforcement learning (Klucharev et al., 2009; Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010; Kim et al., 2012; Shestakova et al., 2013). For example, in the study by Klucharev et al. ( 2009), participants were asked to rate female faces and then saw the purported aggregate judgments of other raters. Upon seeing those faces a second time, participants' ratings were shown to shift in the direction of the group judgments. Neuroimaging results demonstrated that when individual ratings differed from those of the group, activity in the rostral cingulate zone, an area in the medial prefrontal cortex and involved in the processing of conflict (Ridderinkhof et al., 2004), increased, while activity in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with the expectation of reward (Knutson et al., 2005), decreased. Interestingly, the amplitude of these signals predicted conformity, such that when this incongruence was large (although exactly what magnitude this discrepancy should be to trigger conformity is still undetermined), people then adjusted their behavior and aligned their opinion with that of the group (Klucharev et al., 2009). Similar neural discrepancy signals reflecting the deviation of one's own assessment and a salient external opinion have been reported by other studies as well (Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010; Deuker et al., 2013; Izuma and Adolphs, 2013; Lohrenz et al., 2013).

KEY CONCEPT 3

Reinforcement learning is learning about the environment by trial and error. By encountering positive and negative outcomes, individuals learn over time what action to select to maximize reward. In conformity research, acceptance by the group is typically seen as the reward and matching one's attitude, opinion or behavior with those of others as the means to achieve this outcome.

Consistent with previous work showing that regions in the medial prefrontal cortex are associated with behavioral adjustment following both positive/negative or unexpected outcomes (Ridderinkhof et al., 2004), activity in this region, slightly more anterior than the medial frontal activity reported by Klucharev et al. ( 2009), has been found to encode not only conformity toward the liked group, but has also been shown to correlate with behavioral adjustments away from the disliked group (Izuma and Adolphs, 2013, and see Izuma, 2013 for an overview of medial frontal activations in social conformity studies). To test the causal role of the medial frontal cortex in conformity, researchers used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily down-regulate this area in order to examine whether this interfered with behavioral adjustments to group opinions (Klucharev et al., 2011). Indeed, transient down-regulation of this region appeared to reduce behavioral change, confirming the critical involvement of the posterior medial prefrontal cortex in conformity. We believe that this research demonstrates a clear role for functional neuroimaging in better elucidating the precise systems that underpin social conformity. While we have used the mechanism of reinforcement learning here as an example of how we can better understand complex social behavior by examining basic processes, future investigations are required to gain more insight into the exact processes underlying conformity. For instance, it is unknown to date whether deviation from the group opinion triggers actual dopamine-dependent reward prediction error signals, or whether conformity is processed in different ways.

Validating psychological theories

In addition to identifying more precisely the neural mechanisms of conformity, neuroscience can help to adjudicate between competing psychological theories that make similar behavioral predictions with regard to the reason why people conform. For instance, one of the first neuroimaging studies on social influence aimed to ascertain whether conformity is a function of an explicit decision to match the choices of others, or whether the presence of others actually changes individuals' true perception or attentional focus (Berns et al., 2005). By using fMRI and a mental rotation task, the authors examined the neural correlates of conformity in the face of incorrect peer feedback regarding the degree of rotation of an abstract figure. Conforming to incorrect feedback altered activity within visual cortical and parietal regions that were involved in performance of the mental rotation task itself. Based on the involvement of these regions in perception and based on the absence of activity in frontal decision-making regions the authors concluded that behavioral change in this study was due to a modification of low-level perceptual processes as opposed to a decision to conform taken at an executive level. Though caution is warranted when using these types of reverse inference techniques to establish knowledge of precise cognitive processes (Poldrack, 2006), additional support for the hypothesis that social conformity can affect basic cognitive processing comes from electroencephalography (EEG) work showing that deviation from the norm of a peer group can impact early visual brain signals (Trautmann-Lengsfeld and Herrmann, 2013, 2014).

Another focus of neuroimaging research has been to investigate whether viewing the opinion of others can actually change individuals' true preferences, testing social psychological theories which distinguish genuine attitude modifications from mere public compliance in which people conform without changing their true attitude (Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004). This direction has shown promise, demonstrating that social influence moderates activity in the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These two brain areas are known to be involved in the processing of rewards, and are believed to work in concert to encode subjective value (Bartra et al., 2013). Signal across these areas was enhanced when participants viewed simple, abstract symbols that had been rated in popularity by peers (Mason et al., 2009), in addition to when participants were presented with actual concrete stimuli such as faces and songs that were liked by others (Klucharev et al., 2009; Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010; Zaki et al., 2011). Together, these findings suggest that the behavior and opinion of others can in fact directly impact the neural representation of value associated with particular stimuli, and demonstrate how neuroimaging can help in disentangling true conformity from simple public compliance. As such, this approach provides valuable information in validating and extending psychological theories of conformity.

KEY CONCEPT 4

Compliance refers to a superficial form of conformity when individuals express the same opinion or behavior as the group but do not change their actual underlying attitude or belief. Compliance is also known as public conformity and is the opposite of private conformity, or internalization, when people truly believe the group is right and actual preference change occurs.

Predicting behavioral change

A third way by which neuroscience research may contribute to a better understanding of social influence is in its ability to use brain data to directly predict behavior. For example, the strength of the discrepancy signal in response to a conflict between one's own judgment and that of a group not only predicted subsequent conformity, but activity within the striatum also correlated with individual differences, with participants who adjusted their opinion in response to group disagreement showing lower activations in this area than participants who did not adjust their views (Klucharev et al., 2009). Individual differences in the tendency to align one's behavior with the group have also been associated with functional and structural differences in the orbitofrontal cortex (Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2012a; Charpentier et al., 2014). Additionally, these tendencies can be modulated by administration of oxytocin (Stallen et al., 2012), a hormone involved in a wide range of social behaviors, as well as methylphenidate, an indirect dopamine and noradrenalin agonist (Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2012b).

An interesting extension to this laboratory research, and one that received relatively little attention to date, is to what extent neural activity can predict actual long-term behavioral change, as measured in real-world decisions. One study showed that the discrepancy signal in the medial frontal cortex could predict preference change several months later (Izuma and Adolphs, 2013). However, this finding could potentially be explained by the general tendency to be consistent with one's own previous behavior, since participants had already explicitly rated the stimuli once before in this experiment. A follow-up study that circumvented this issue demonstrated robust conformity effects whereby judgments of facial attractiveness were altered by knowing the opinions of others, with this effect lasting up to 3 days (Huang et al., 2014). Persistent conformity effects were also found in a study examining the impact of social pressure on memory change (Edelson et al., 2011). Participants in this study were exposed to incorrect recollections of other co-observers while being asked questions about a documentary they had viewed. After a week's delay they were tested again, and though they were informed that the answers they had heard before were actually determined randomly, participants nonetheless still showed a strong tendency to conform to the erroneous recollections of the group, with, importantly, neuroimaging data indicating that social influence modified the neural representation of the memories. Specifically, both activity in the amygdala at the time of exposure to social influence, as well as the strength of connectivity between this area and the hippocampus, predicted long-lasting, persistent memory errors. Future progress in this field could usefully focus on how this work extends to the public health arena, as discussed in the following section.

Conclusion and future directions

Though in its relative infancy in terms of a substantive body of experimental research, neuroscience, and in particular functional neuroimaging, has a great deal to offer the study of social influence. Knowledge of the neural mechanisms underlying conformity can be used to constrain existing psychological theories, as well as to construct novel ones, and can help in understanding what precise cognitive processes are engaged. To achieve this, a productive next step is to better understand how to interpret brain activity. For instance, does the discrepancy signal in the medial frontal cortex in response to a conflict between one's own opinion and that of a group reflect the process of cognitive reappraisal and subsequent attitude adjustment, or rather does it indicate an increase in negative affect which in turn can motivate behavioral change? Other interpretations are also possible, for example theories that medial frontal activity reflects recruitment of theory of mind processes (Gallagher and Frith, 2003), the experience of conflict (Pochon et al., 2002; Klucharev et al., 2009), or, more generally, a violation of expectations (Chang and Sanfey, 2013). Of course, brain areas are typically not selectively engaged in a single psychological process but rather are implicated in multiple computations, and therefore the interpretation of brain activity based solely on the findings from the research outlined here is challenging. Naturally, the increasing number of studies in this area will help in delineating the precise processes involved, and converging methodological approaches also have promise in this regard. For example, additional data from independent localizer tasks within the same participants can be helpful in determining the psychological process in which a brain area is engaged (Zaki et al., 2011; Izuma and Adolphs, 2013), and the use of meta-analyses, functional connectivity approaches assessing neural network computations, and large-scale databases can also help reduce the potential pool of hypotheses (Poldrack, 2011). One useful online meta-analysis database is the platform Neurosynth, which allows for large-scale automated meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data (Yarkoni et al., 2011).

We suggest that one specific promising future direction for neuroscience to contribute to the understanding of social influence is to further investigate the emotions that drive behavioral adjustments due to conformity. For instance, people may align their preferences with others because they affiliate and thereby feel a need to belong to a group (Tafarodi et al., 2002; Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004). However, negative emotions, such as the fear of social exclusion or a sense of shame or guilt in having differing opinions, could also be drivers of conformity (Janes and Olson, 2000; Berns et al., 2010; Yu and Sun, 2013). Combining neuroscientific methodologies with clever behavioral paradigms can provide substantially greater insight into the specific emotions that underlie conformity in a given context, as accumulating evidence suggests that neuroimaging data can support inferences about affective states (Knutson et al., 2014). The use of innovative methods, including multivariate brain imaging techniques, can be expected to improve the mapping of brain activity onto both affective experience and behavior in the near future (Formisano and Kriegeskorte, 2012).

The accumulating laboratory evidence allied with these aforementioned likely future developments demonstrates great promise in constructing improved neural and psychological models of social conformity. A better understanding of the processes that drive conformity is not only interesting from a scientific perspective, but also provides relevant practical insights for social policy. Policy campaigns often attempt to motivate behavioral change by the use of social influence, such as programs discouraging smoking among adolescents by emphasizing peer disapproval, or reducing alcohol consumption at schools by correcting prevalent, though false, beliefs about the behavior of others (Neighbors et al., 2004; Youth smoking prevention: truth campaign USA). Although social influence campaigns such as these can sometimes be effective, there are also many cases in which they fail (Clapp et al., 2003; Granfield, 2005). Deeper understanding of the processes that both facilitate and prevent social conformity will undoubtedly help to predict when, and how, behavioral change can occur, and has the potential to provide useful hypotheses that can be tested in real-world field experiments.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC313454) and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (FOCOM).

Biography

Mirre Stallen is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Psychology at Stanford University. Prior to moving to the US she held a postdoctoral position at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She obtained her PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Her research interests are in understanding the psychological and neuroscientific processes underlying social decision-making, and in the application of these laboratory findings to address real-world societal issues.

References

Cabinet Office UK Behavioural Insights Team (2012). Applying Behavioural Insights to Reduce Fraud, Error and Debt. London: UK Government. [Google Scholar]

Coleman S. (2007). The Minnesota income tax compliance experiment: replication of the social norms experiment, in MPRA Working Paper, 1-6. 10.2139/ssrn.1393292 [[CrossRef] Google Scholar]

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The neuroscience of social conformity: implications for fundamental and applied research

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The development of closer ties between researchers and practitioners in the domain of behavior and behavioral change offers useful opportunities for better informing public policy campaigns via a deeper understanding of the psychological processes that operate in real-world decision-making.

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Two aspects that are important in group behavior are conformity and compliance. Both conformity and compliance are prevalent in all types of groups, but first is important to point out the differences between these two types of behavior. Conformity within a group entails members changing their attitudes and beliefs in order to match those of others within the group.

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Effects conformity has on High School students

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Effects conformity has on High School students

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"A Futile Struggle? Power and Conformity in High School and the Society" by Eric Reed

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George Simmel describes small groups as being "closely coherent," allowing "its individual members only a narrow field for the development of unique qualities and free self-responsible movements" (Simmel 2004:133). Throughout my experience in high school I witnessed this first hand, struggling with a need for acceptance, and being swept into conformity.

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Is individuality to be contained or nurtured in schools?

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Schools adopt different measures to control hyperactivity in children that helps them to conform teens according to their rules

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When conservative believers jeer and jab at atheism, they frequently point to North Korea as an example of what a perfect atheist state looks like.

Next time that happens, just send them a link to this article from yesterday's Washington Post.

Author Anna Fifield explains how the country's schoolchildren are force-fed the idea that their leaders are divine beings. "Kimism" is a religion in all but name.

The personality cult that permeates every aspect of North Korean life has become an ideology in itself. It revolves around Kim Il Sung, portrayed as an anti-Japanese revolutionary hero and founding father who remains North Korea's "eternal president" more than two decades after his death.

His son, Kim Jong Il, was, according to North Korean myth, born on a sacred mountain, under a bright star at night. (In reality, he was born in Siberia.) Since Kim Jong Il's death in 2011, Kim Jong Un has taken over the family business.

If you live in North Korea, you cannot escape the propaganda barrage.

Every home, office, classroom and even train car features portraits of the first two leaders, and the pictures must be cleaned with a special cloth every day.

North Koreans wear pins, usually of Kim Il Sung but sometimes of both Kim One and Kim Two, on their chests, on the left to be close to their hearts.

Television sets and radios are fixed to state-run channels - being caught with an unfixed device, or worse, foreign DVDs, is a severe offense that often leads to time at a labor camp - and for all but a handful of the elite, there is no Internet. Although an increasing amount of information seeps across the border from China, the state continues to have almost total control over the flow of information.

All this Orwellian excess is spoon-fed to kids from an early age, no later than kindergarten.

"The milk would arrive and we would go up one by one to fill our cups," recalled Lee [a recent defector].

"The teachers would say: 'Do you know where the milk came from? It came from the Dear Leader. Because of his love and consideration, we are drinking milk today.' I didn't really ask questions. Somehow I just knew not to."
Children's books convey the ideology, too. The Butterfly and the Cockerel, for example, tells the story of an irascible, bullying rooster (the United States) outwitted by a small, virtuous butterfly (North Korea). Teachers don't just teach history, they teach "revolutionary history." And all music, storybooks, novels and artwork relate to the Kims.

Math problems taught in North Korea's schools are habitually cast in terms of political ideology, even war, said a teacher who escaped the dictatorship. For instance:

"If you have this many of Kim Il Sung's anti-Japanese fighters and this many Japanese soldiers, and X-many Japanese soldiers are killed . . ."

There are 365 days' worth of education materials, so every day teachers could say to their students, " On this day, Kim Il Sung went there, did that." At age 7, all children must join the Children's Union. The next year, they start Saturday "self-criticism" sessions in which they must confess how they fell short of the "Ten Principles" that are the foundation of North Korea's ideology. The principles include requirements such as studying the "revolutionary ideas of Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung" daily.

At 14, they move up to the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, which focuses on worshiping the Kim family.

To complete the conditioning,

High school students in North Korea must complete a three-year, 81-hour course on the history of Kim Jong Un, according to a recent report from South Korea's KBS World Radio, which cited a copy of the North Korean Education Committee's "compulsory education outline." The course is in addition to a 160-hour course on Kim Il Sung and 148 hours of study about Kim Jong Il.

[T]he system of surveillance and informing on people is so pervasive that husbands dare not voice doubts about the regime to their wives, and parents, if they are skeptical, dare not try to protect their children's minds.

Does any of that sound like freethinking or atheism to you? Brutally enforcing a cult of worship on an entire nation would seem to be, I dunno, pretty much the polar opposite.

(Image via Shutterstock)

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How North Korea Brainwashes Children To Conform to "Kimism"

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When conservative believers jeer and jab at atheism, they frequently point to North Korea as an example of what a perfect atheist state looks like.Next time that happens, just send them a link to this article from yesterday's Washington Post.Author Anna Fifield explains how the country's schoolchildren are force-fed the idea that their leaders are divine beings.

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In English ecclesiastical law. Adherence to the doctrines and usages of the Church of England.

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What is CONFORMITY? definition of CONFORMITY (Black's Law Dictionary)

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In English ecclesiastical law. Adherence to the doctrines and usages of the Church of England. Did you find this definition of CONFORMITY helpful? You can share it by copying the code below and adding it to your blog or web page. Written and fact checked by The Law Dictionary

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Immediate effect of conformity behavior

Twenty-one 5-year-old and twenty 6-year-old children participated in the study. We asked them to judge the attractiveness of female faces by reporting to the experimenter (). Then they were presented with group ratings which were equally likely to be above or below children's ratings by 1, 2 or 3 points. After 30 minutes, participants were instructed to rate the faces again (). We measured individual conformity by calculating the rating updates between second and initial rating. A two-way repeated-measure ANOVA was conducted with rating updates (re-rating (mean standardized) minus initial rating (mean standardized)) as dependent variable across three conditions ("peers-higher" vs. "peers-agree" vs. "peers-lower") as within factors, and groups (5-year-olds vs. 6-year-olds) as between factors. We used mean standardized (with a reduction of the mean scores from all participants within each group) initial rating and re-rating scores to reduce strong individual preference and make the results more comparable within each group and between groups. The results revealed a significant main effect of conditions, F(2,78) = 3.146,  = 0.049, η p ² = 0.075, and a marginally significant interaction effect between groups and conditions, F(2,78) = 3.073,  = 0.087, η p ² = 0.073, suggesting that the degree of conformity varied across two different groups (see ). Two separate repeated-measure ANOVAs with 3 feedback conditions ("peers-higher" vs. "peers-agree" vs. "peers-lower") as independent variable, and rating updates (after mean-corrected) as dependent variable were performed in 6-year-old and 5-year-old children respectively. We found a significant main effect of feedback among 6-year-old children, F(2,38) = 4.22,  = 0.022, η p ² = 0.18, but not among 5-year-old children F(2,40) = 0.65,  = 0.526, η p ²  = 0.032, suggesting that conflicts from group opinions may lead to subsequent behavioral conformity among 6-year-old children but not 5-year-old children.

Post hoc analysis revealed that 6 year-old participants rated faces as more attractive in the "peers-higher" condition (mean ±  SD: 0.386 ± 0.579); paired sample t-test, t(19) = −1.763, p = 0.094, Cohen's d = −0.405, and less attractive but not significant in the "peers-lower" condition (mean ±  SD: −0.056 ± 0.303); paired sample t-test, t(19) = −0.786, p = 0.442, d = −0.180) compared to "peers-agree" condition (mean ±  SD: 0.063 ± 0.611) respectively, and also significantly differed from each other (paired sample t-test, t(19) = −3.292, p = 0.004, d = −0.755), even though the faces from "peers-higher" and "peers-lower" conditions had initially been rated as equally attractive ( p = 0.285). However, no update differences between "peers-higher" (mean ±  SD: 0.310 ± 0.605) and "peers-lower" (mean ±  SD: 0.108 ± 0.621) conditions were observed for 5-year-olds (paired sample t-test, t(20) = −0.457, p = 0.653, d = −0.102), and also when compared to "peers-agree" (mean ±  SD: 0.237 ± 0.829) condition respectively, all p values > 0.2.

Besides, we selected faces whose initial rating was 3, 4, 5 or 6, and then compared the rating updates between "peers-lower" and "peers-higher" conditions. We only include these faces with median rating for they are less susceptible to regression to the mean; meanwhile to avoid the instability of limited trial numbers using only faces whose initial ratings were 4 or 5. In particular, the number of trials in each condition with initial rating of 3, 4, 5, 6 was 18.6 ± 8.28 (mean ±  SD) for "peers-lower", 15.9 ± 2.55 for "peers-agree", and 17.15 ± 6.51 for "peers-higher". For 5-year-olds, the numbers of trials in each condition were comparable to those in 6-year-olds (13.19 ± 5.97 for "peers-lower", 15.47 ± 3.23 for "peers-agree", and 12.48 ± 6.48 for "peers-higher"). Similarly, we found a significant difference between "pees-lower" and "peers-higher" among 6-year-olds, t(19) = −2.929, p = 0.009, d = −0.672. Interestingly, no differences were found significantly against "peers-agree" respectively (peers-lower: t(19) = −0.585, p = 0.565, d = −0.134; peers-higher: t(19) = −1.293, p = 0.211, d = −0.297), suggesting that these effects can be out of conflicts from group rating. Moreover, this effect was not found among 5-year-old children, all p values > 0.6.

Our results were further confirmed using a linear mixed model. To fit the behavioral judgments of attractiveness, we used the group rating as the fixed effect and initial rating across each subject as the random effect. Two separate models were built among 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds children respectively. Statistical significance of the model was computed by likelihood ratio tests of the full model with the fixed effect of group rating against a null model without the fixed effect of group rating. We found that in the full model, group rating could predict behavioral judgments with a significant regression coefficient (slope; β = 0.076, p = 0.006) and intercept (β = 5.35, p < 0.001) among 6-year-olds children, and the full model with the fixed effect of group rating significantly outperformed the null model (χ ²(6) = 7.318, p = 0.007), suggesting a significant conformity effect among 6-year-olds children. However, no significant regression effect of group were observed among 5-year-olds children (slope; β = −0.041, p = 0.153). Meanwhile, the full model with the fixed effect of group rating did not significantly outperform the null model (χ ²(6) = 1.940, p = 0.164), suggesting that 5-year-olds children subject to group influence but do not exhibit a conformity behavior. To examine whether participants adjusted their ratings symmetrically in the 'peers-lower' and 'peers-higher' conditions, we added the direction of conflicts as a fixed effect. The group effect was confirmed among 6-year-old children (slope; β = 0.053, p = 0.07), but not among 5-year-old children (slope; β = −0.029, p = 0.326). However, no significant predictive effect of the direction of conflicts was found (5-year-olds: slope; β = 0.074, p = 0.295; 6-year-olds: slope; β = −0.100, p  = 0.182), suggesting that both positive and negative conflicts with the group modulated second rating to the similar degree (see ).

A further correlation analysis between rating updates and ages were performed among all participants to investigate the developmental process of social conformity among children, however, no significant correlation was found between them ( r = 0.127, p = 0.427). Besides, we tested the gender difference within each group, and found no significant difference among 5-year-olds (independent-sample t-test, t(20) = −0.853, p = 0.404, d = 0.191) and 6-year-olds (independent-sample t-test, t(19) = −1.736, p = 0.10, d = −0.398) respectively. For the sake of completeness, we also reported the response time when making initial judgments. No significant difference were found across different conditions among 5-year-old children (one way repeated-measure ANOVA, F(2,40) = 1.278, p = 0.285, η p ² = 0.034) and 6-year-old children (one way repeated-measure ANOVA, F(2,38) = 0.092, p = 0.912, η p ²  = 0.005) respectively. Taken together, our results suggested a comparable bi-directional conformity based on both positive and negative conflicts with group rating irrespective of gender among 6-year-olds children but not their 5-year-olds counterparts.

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Social conformity persists at least one day in 6-year-old children

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Humans have a tendency to forgo their own attitudes or beliefs in order to better align with the interests of a majority, a behavioral process known as conformity. Social conformity has been widely studied among adults and adolescents, whereas experimental ...