ABSTRACT
Chapter overview What shapes your preferences? Why do you believe in certain things? This chapter is about opinions, i.e., our beliefs, values and attitudes, and about behavior that corresponds to opinions. As an introduction to this subtheme of culture, I begin with a puzzling observation, namely that the popularity of “cultural products” (books, music, songs and movies) is incredibly unequal. Most of the cultural products produced no one has heard of, while just a few are known by almost everybody. How can we explain the dazzling success of the Harry Potter books? (5.1). I introduce the idea that people’s opinions are affected by their social context and discuss self-fulfilling prophecies, which result from a dynamic interplay between the individual and the social context (5.2). Then I discuss classic laboratory experiments which show that, in small-scale settings, people conform to the opinions of others in their direct social environment. Subsequently, I will show that the same pattern occurs in the family, among peers in school and when people are exposed to media. I will identify conformity as a stylized fact, i.e., the human tendency to conform to the opinions of other people in their social environment (5.3). Then, I will outline two mechanisms which can explain conformity, namely: learning from other people (informational social influence) and complying with norms (normative social influence) (5.4). It is the idea of informational social influence that sociologists have generalized into a more comprehensive theory on social learning. I will discuss this theory and identify several social learning biases, i.e., conditions that modify the tendency to conform (5.5). With this knowledge on social learning theory and social learning biases, we are then able to understand the success of Harry Potter and other popular cultural products (5.6). I end with a discussion of how this theory is used to understand the diffusion of innovations, which are opinions on new ideas and products (5.7).
