Popular Delusions: How Social Conformity Molds Society and Polit ...

The conformity model goes beyond the typical sociological explanation, however, in its focus on the relative sizes of social groups and in the underlying cognitive model of how people perceive conformity. The aspects of conformity that go on without a person’s conscious awareness further distance the conformity model from standard sociological theories. But one might say that the conformity model is a subset of political sociology or, rather, political social-psychology.

The conformity model departs substantially from rational choice theory in its view of politics; compared to rational choice, it is more like a separate dimension of political behavior. Nonconscious cognitive processes also divide the theories, diminishing the role of intentionality essential to rational choice. As subsequent evidence will show, the effect of social conformity on political party choice is an especially radical departure from rational choice—or any theory of democracy. To a conformist, the relative number of supporters for different political parties and the number of political parties competing are the main factors affecting voting choice, not the candidates themselves or what any party stands for. One does not need to know much about the parties or issues in an election to show the effect of conformity on the results. The main overlap between rational choice and conformity is the idea that many voters use a heuristic or shortcut to decision making. Heuristics have been brought into rational choice models when trying to explain the choices of voters who are often ignorant of political facts and public policy or do not vote in their own best interest, that is, according to their expressed preferences.³⁷ Such models acknowledge the cognitive limitations of voters. Awash with a sea of information, a voter may adopt a simplified way of making a voting decision, such as relying on party identification, poll results, or the appearance of a candidate. Where rational choice sees a heuristic as a “fix” for poorly explained voting behavior, however, conformity theory sees it as the essence of explanation.

Another sharp distinction between a rational political model and a conformity-based model is the question of collective action, as famously raised by Mancur Olson in the Logic of Collective Action. To the rational member of a group, there is little value in contributing to a group when one can obtain the group’s benefits without doing much of anything—free-riding, as it is called. Jared Diamond, in his popular book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, cites the “tragedy of the commons” as one reason that societies fail.