Our main activity has been the development of two theoretical models. Each model embodies two of our key assumptions and shows how each assumption enables understanding of phenomena that are otherwise difficult to explain. The first assumption is that there is an important psychological distinction between our underlying preferences and attitudes and our beliefs about what those preferences and attitudes are. The second assumption is that our preferences and attitudes must be represented as distributions rather than single points.
The first model is a cognitive model of social influence (Social Sampling Theory: SST). The model is applied to several aspects of social network behaviour, with a particular emphasis on political polarization and contagion effects in social networks. People in a social network are assumed to observe the behaviour of their network neighbours and thereby infer the social distribution of particular attitudes and behaviours. It is assumed in SST that (a) people dislike behaving in ways that are extreme within their neighbourhood social norm (social extremeness aversion assumption), and hence tend to conform and (b) people prefer to behave consistently with their own underlying attitudes (authenticity preference assumption) hence minimizing dissonance. People’s preferences for authenticity (effectively, being true to themselves) will often be conflict with their desire to fit in with their social group, and hence the attitudes that people choose to express well, according to the model, represent a compromise between these two conflicting tendencies.
We show that SST provides a new perspective on a number of well-known phenomena including for example (a) the development of segregated opinion neighborhoods and echo chambers, (b) political polarization, and (c) the opposing effects on subjective well-being of authentic behavior and high levels of social comparison (Brown et al., in 2022).
The second model (Relative Rank Theory: RRT) aims to reconcile the systematic context-dependence of choice (e.g. between items on a supermarket shelf) with the existence of stable individual differences in people’s preferences. RRT distinguishes between three types of psychological preference. Underlying preferences (preferences_U) are stable across contexts but do not directly inform everyday choices from markets of three or more options; inferred preferences (preferences_I, which can be thought of as beliefs about preferences_U) are context-dependent, learned, and do directly inform such choices. Expressed preferences (preferences_E) may differ again. Together with the assumption that judgements and valuations are relative and rank-based, this distinction enables RRT to account for stability and context-dependence in choice without assuming commensurability of attribute values.
We have also examined the general assumptions that underlie our approach. One central assumption is that people are sensitive to the relative ranked positions that they occupy within a social comparison group. In additional work we have been able to confirm predictions of this approach, showing for example in two large international samples that a 10% increase in income is associated with an increase in life satisfaction that is more than twice as large in a country with low-income inequality as it is in a country with high income inequality (Quispe-Torreblanca et al., 2020). We have also explored the theoretical relationship between our rank-based models of subjective well-being and various indices of relative deprivation (Hounkpatin, Wood, & Brown, 2020).
Another general assumption is the “incommensurability of value.” We have argued that existing models of choice in both psychology and economics are severely limited by assumptions about the commensurability of value, i.e. the idea that everyday choices can be understood in terms of people selecting between options on the basis of a single utility-like common currency (Walasek & Brown, 2023)
Brown, G. D. A., Lewandowsky, S., & Huang, Z. (2022). Social sampling and expressed attitudes: Authenticity Preference and Social Extremeness Aversion lead to social norm effects and polarization. Psychological Review, 129, 18-48
Hounkpatin, H. O., Wood, A. M., & Brown, G. D. A. (2020). Comparing indices of relative deprivation using behavioural evidence. Social Science & Medicine, 259, 112914.
Quispe-Torreblanca, E. G., Brown, G. D. A., Boyce, C. J., Wood, A. M., & De Neve, J. (2020). Inequality and social rank: Income increases buy more life satisfaction in more equal countries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47, 519–539.
Walasek, L., & Brown, G. D. A. (2023). Incomparability and incommensurability in choice: No common currency of value? Perspectives on Psychological Science.
