DOI: 10.3886/e184271
title: Self-construal and conformity

description: Social influence is ubiquitous in our daily lives, influencing our opinions, beliefs, and behaviors. Individual differences may determine who is most likely to conform to the opinions of others. More specifically, individual differences in interdependent and independent self-construal determine an individual’s sensitivity to and focus on their social surroundings. Relatedly, society traditionally ascribes and prescribes different levels of agency (independence) and communion (interdependence) to men and women. Here, we examined how individual differences in self-construal, and their congruence with gender expectations, influence how people process and respond to social feedback. Results from independent behavioral and neuroimaging samples show that a stronger interdependent self-construal was associated with increased likelihood of conformity, whereas an independent self-construal was not. Further, neuroimaging data suggests that the relationship between brain activity and conformity is moderated by the congruence of gender stereotypes and self-construal. Specifically, stereotypically congruent women (with stronger interdependence) and men (with stronger independence) showed increased activity in mentalizing regions (and value regions in men) when conforming. Stereotypically incongruent women (with stronger independence) and men (with stronger interdependence) showed decreased mentalizing activity when conforming. These results shed light on underlying (neuro)psychological mechanisms that are associated with conformity among different groups.<br>
description: Presence of Common Scales: Self-construal scale. As a part of both studies, participants were asked to complete the self-construal scale from Singelis (1994). The scale consists of 30 items total (15 measuring interdependence and 15 measuring independence, giving each individual a separate score on these two subscales). Participants were asked to rate each item based on how much it reflected their personality on a scale from 1 “strongly disagree” to 7 “strongly agree”. An example of a statement measuring independence is “I enjoy being unique and different from others in many respects”, where “Even when I strongly disagree with group members, I avoid an argument” is designed to measure interdependence. <br><br> Social influence task – initial ratings.<b> </b>After participants gave consent to participate in the study, they were asked to complete initial ratings for the conformity task. Initial ratings were given before the fMRI brain scanning session. This involved giving preliminary recommendations on 80 mobile game apps (participants made ratings for 60 mobile phone apps in one of the fMRI samples but other elements of the task were the same) in response to a prompt asking “how likely would you be to recommend the game to a friend” from 1 “wouldn’t recommend” to 5 “would recommend” based on exposure to the app title, logo, and a brief description similar to information contained in the App Store (Cascio et al., 2015; Figure 1). All apps were real puzzle-based game apps taken from the Apple Store. For the purposes of the study, we chose mostly unknown apps so that personal knowledge or experience with the apps would not influence the results of the study.<b> <br></b><br> Social influence task – social feedback. Next, participants completed the social feedback portion of the social influence task. fMRI participants completed this portion of the task during the brain scanning session. During the social feedback portion of the task, each trial consisted of three parts. Participants first were exposed to a reminder of the game using the title and logo along with a reminder of how they initially rated the game (2 seconds). Next participants were exposed to manipulated peer group recommendations relative to their own (3 seconds; Figure 2). The peer feedback consisted of four within-subject conditions where participants found out that peers made ratings that were higher, lower, or the same as the participant or they were given no social feedback as a control condition (participants that rated 80 apps were exposed to 20 trials for each feedback condition and participants that rated 60 apps were exposed to 15 trials for each feedback condition). Finally, participants were asked to give a final recommendation for each game (3 seconds).
description: on-site questionnaire; other;