Peer pressure: Conformity outweighs reciprocity in social anxiety

Social anxiety (SA) is characterized by a persistent fear of negative evaluation and marked difficulties in forming social relationships. Concerned with falling short of standards, the socially anxious make important efforts to obtain approval within their group. In the current research, we extended previous findings on excessive conformity in social anxiety, by quantifying the indirect effect of social anxiety-related conformity on unrelated third parties. Two hundred and eleven participants were assigned to one of 6 subgroups based on SA cutoffs and experimental condition. Participants first interacted in a Survival task together with 5 other participants (group of reference), and then completed a monetary Prisoner’s Dilemma session against an unrelated and cooperative Person B. Prior to being asked to split the allocated $10, participants were presented with their reference group’s proposed split of the money and also with Person B’s proposed amount to each member of the group. Depending on experimental condition, group members were made to appear either as fair or highly unfair, while Person B was always fair. Participants were thus given two alternatives: reciprocate fairness or conform to unfairness. Our results show that high SA individuals tend to align to the group’s unfair behavior, even though conformity, in this case, is to mistreat an otherwise well-intentioned stranger. Intriguingly, while the general population follows the norms of reciprocity, for the high SA participants, conformity to the group behavior outweighs prosocial reciprocity. Taken together, our findings show that individuals high in SA are more compliant to the group’s demands.