Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Consensus seeking – abandoning one’s own judgment to alignwith a group majority – is a fundamental feature of humansocial interaction. Notably, such striving for majorityaffiliation often occurs in the absence of any apparenteconomic or social gain, suggesting that achieving consensusmight have intrinsic value. Here, we examine the affectiveproperties of consensus decisions by assessing the transfer ofvalence to concomitant stimuli. Specifically, in two studies,we show that contexts repeatedly paired with consensusdecisions are rated as more likable, and selected morefrequently in a two-alternative forced choice test, than arecontexts repeatedly paired with dissent from a unanimousmajority. In the second study, we rule out inferences aboutthe accuracy of the majority opinion as the basis for suchevaluative changes. Our results suggest that an intrinsic valueof consensus, or cost of dissent, may motivate and reinforcesocial conformity.