The Effects of Social Feedback on Private Opinions. Empirical Evidence from the Laboratory

How and why do people change their opinions in social settings? This question has been of interest since Solomon Asch (1951, 1955) established how easily social influence can push individuals to change their publicly expressed opinion into the direction of the perceived majority opinion, even if this opinion is obviously flawed. Yet, publicly expressed opinions that are due to compliance with surrounding others are prone to vary with the situational circumstances. In Asch's conformity experiments in fact vastly different motivations on the individual level resulted in the same type of observed behavioral outcome, namely adaptation. In these cases it remains unclear whether opinion changes occur only on a superficial level of adjusting public utterances in order to meet group expectations (public conformity) or whether private opinions, i.e. the ones that individuals actually hold, are subject to change as well (private acceptance). This question is of increasing relevance nowadays as the ever-growing connectivity between people via internet occurs simultaneously with them embracing more and more opposing standpoints. In order to explain the persistence of opinion divergence, a number of opinion exchange models and social influence mechanisms have been suggested. One of the most recent introduces a reinforcement learning mechanism that is based on social feedback (Banisch and Olbrich 2019). The basic idea is that within a reward-driven process, individuals not only re-evaluate the opinions they have expressed and learn which opinions are safe to express in their neighborhood, but also internalize the expected opinion and integrate it with their existing values until it becomes independent of the external source.

We present two laboratory experiments in which we investigated whether or not social feedback yields any relevant effect on actual private opinions and, moreover, if any potentially resulting change corresponds to whether the social feedback was supportive or rejective in its nature. The empirical evidence obtained during the original as well as the replication study ultimately suggests that the mixture of positive and negative social feedback statements in particular had a lasting impact on the private opinion under study. Recipients tended to change their opinion to the presumably more socially accepted opinion. Our results thus demonstrate that social feedback causes adjustment in privately held opinions even under anonymous and sanction free conditions.