Exploring the Relationship Between Social Media Exposure and Levels of Conformity: An Evolutionary Analysis

As social media becomes popular, false belief in fake news on social media has caused great problems. It can be hypothesized that conformity is a byproduct for human evolving into accepting more and more information. It is predicted that with higher level of addiction to social media, the level of conformity shown will be higher. This study examined if conformity was positively correlated with social media addiction. Participants are consisted of 10 men and women who use social media for at least 1 year. They will be divided into five groups by their level of social media addiction by using the "Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale" (BSMAS). Every participant will answer the set of non-open questions we designed before with 9 confederates. By increasing the number of confederates who give the wrong answer randomly, we can observe the confederate threshold when testers show conformity tendency. We can also observe the different confederate threshold in different testers group, which shows the relationship between the level of social media addiction and conformity tendency.