Views That Are Shared With Others Are Expressed With Greater Confidence and Greater Fluency Independent of Any Social Influence

Asher Koriat, Shiri Adiv, Norbert Schwarz

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Research on group influence has yielded a prototypical majority effect (PME): Majority views are endorsed faster and with greater confidence than minority views, with the difference increasing with majority size. The PME was attributed to conformity pressure enhancing confidence in consensual views and causing inhibition in venturing deviant opinions. Our results, however, indicate that PME for binary choices can arise from the process underlying confidence and latency independent of social influence. PME was demonstrated for tasks and conditions that are stripped of social relevance; it was observed in within-individual analyses in contrasting the individual’s more frequent and less frequent responses to the same item, and was found for the predictions of others’ responses. A self-consistency model, which assumes that choice and confidence are based on the sampling of representations from a commonly shared pool of representations, yielded a PME for confidence and latency. Behavioral implications of the results are discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)176-193
Number of pages18
JournalPersonality and Social Psychology Review
Volume20
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, © 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Keywords

  • confidence
  • conformity
  • metacognition
  • minority slowness effect
  • self-consistency model

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Social Psychology

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