| Chapter 1: | Social Conformity: The Collective Dimension |
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It is abundantly clear, however, that human thinking, behavior, and decisions often do not fit the ideal rational model. People eat the wrong foods, change their preferences under social pressure, sacrifice their own interests for the common good, follow their instincts and intuition, make mistakes, and generally do a lot of things that are hard to understand. The question is which social behaviors are best explained by rational choice and which require other approaches. One option is to revise rational choice to more realistically model human behavior and accommodate cognitive deficiencies; this is the approach of bounded rationality, which has a large research following. The alternative is to start over with a different theory of behavior. The answer will not come by criticizing rational choice for its failings, however; social science needs a theory that can stand up to rational choice. I believe that alternatives to rational choice theory are possible for collective social behaviors that emerge when human thinking and decision making depart substantially from the rational model. To succeed, therefore, a theory of social conformity must capture the mental processes of people when they act like others or obey a social norm, acting contrary to rational choice. This model of social conformity, in fact, is the basis of the book.
I will show how conformity affects people’s collective decisions when, for example, they name their children, pay taxes, answer the census, commit crimes, vote, and choose between political parties or presidential candidates in national elections. This model distinguishes itself from rational choice because it leads to different predictions about social behavior—predictions not anticipated by and at odds with rational choice. In other words, the intent is not to reject rational choice but to offer an alternative based on new understandings of human cognition.
Conformity Principles
The conformity model in this book is based on several empirical principles about conformity that social psychologists and social scientists have uncovered and which are discussed in more detail in the next chapters.