| The present research intended to demonstrate the importance of the highly conformist personality on the shape and direction of World Wide Web content. The perception of membership within a virtually located group may influence an individual's behavior (Henry, Arrow, & Carini, 1999). The study of group behavior as a science has developed to greater specificity since McDougall (1927) hypothesized the existence of something called "group mind". Cattell (1948) made group behavior quantifiable with his introduction of a classification system borrowed from personality theory. The Internet extended interpersonal relationships, and Web 2.0 technology introduced new response modes to the immediacy of web content (Chu, 2009). Since websites now provide immediate feedback to population conditions in relation to discrete web content, it is expected that content consumers will react to cues left by peers. Such categorical reactions as sympathy, approval, and the redistribution of content might be dependent upon the individual's perceived relationship to the virtual group. These actions, in turn, act as feedback modifiers that reshape the website. The primary aim of the study was to discover the role of social conformity in the shaping of web content objects, specifically text articles. An artificial peer environment was constructed using Web 2.0 technology, with inputs and immediate feedback made available to the participant. A significant relationship between population approval in the form of a thumbs-up bias and personal approval responses in the form of the participant's clicking a thumbs-up was not found from these results. The implications for the future of experimental psychology are that in the virtual group we may find social organization has exceeded the traditional boundaries of physical space, extending existing theories of group psychology.;The present research intended to demonstrate that peer influence in the form of visual cues can mediate behavior on the World Wide Web. The research was designed to test the suspicion that social conformity is a salient factor in the prioritizing of Web content. By extension, it is thought that online behaviors such as clicking Like, thumbs-up, high-5, and other similar content approval buttons are at least in part mediated by social conformity traits. Social conformity, it is reasoned, in turn drives popularity metrics used by social websites and web services, metrics which are used to determine content priority and visibility of specific web content.;Conformity studies merge with the study of group psychology at some point, as conformity is an individual's reaction under group conditions. Indeed, conformity has no meaning independent of an entity's relationship to groups. As shall be shown by a review of the literature, a group may be treated as if it were an entity under some conditions. The literature review section attempted to make a meaningful and relational transition from the broad subject of group psychology to the narrower subject of conformity. The concept of the virtual group was a secondary theme of the entire research project. Psychology and behaviors would be discovered and delineated according to how individuals communicate and form alliances with one another on the Internet. Therefore, the research ultimately looked at the mechanisms by which conformity operates in the context of the Internet. |
