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Motivated by bonuses for agreeing with the majority of their 24-person group, 192 participants in a study of electronic communication sent and received messages from their neighbors in each of 4 spatial configurations over 4 rounds of asynchronous communication. Analyses of the 48 resulting cases showed that over time opinions reorganized themselves so that most people thought they were in the majority, even though substantial numbers of them were not. This spatial clustering was prevalent in all 3 spatial geometries, in contrast to a nonspatial control geometry, whereas consolidation (reduced diversity) was affected by the clumpiness and dimensionality of social space. The results confirm robust derivations of, and thus provide empirical support for, dynamic social impact theory.
Latané et al. (Sat,) studied this question.