Social Conformity Despite Individual Preferences for Distinctiveness

TL;DR

This paper reveals that individual efforts to be distinct can paradoxically lead to complete social conformity, offering a new perspective on social dynamics and diversity.

Contribution

It introduces a formal model showing how distinctiveness-seeking behavior can result in social conformity and diversity, supported by analytical and computational analysis.

Findings

Agents seeking distinctiveness can self-organize into conformity

Minority extremism can influence social dynamics

Model extensions can sustain social diversity

Abstract

We demonstrate that individual behaviors directed at the attainment of distinctiveness can in fact produce complete social conformity. We thus offer an unexpected generative mechanism for this central social phenomenon. Specifically, we establish that agents who have fixed needs to be distinct and adapt their positions to achieve distinctiveness goals, can nevertheless self-organize to a limiting state of absolute conformity. This seemingly paradoxical result is deduced formally from a small number of natural assumptions, and is then explored at length computationally. Interesting departures from this conformity equilibrium are also possible, including divergence in positions. The effect of extremist minorities on these dynamics is discussed. A simple extension is then introduced, which allows the model to generate and maintain social diversity, including multimodal distinctiveness distributions. The paper contributes formal definitions, analytical deductions, and counterintuitive findings to the literature on individual distinctiveness and social conformity.