Shifting Motives to Imitate Prevalent Behavior

Prevalent behavior is imitated. The predominant explanations for this phenomenon are that actors face performance imperatives and thus imitate others in hopes of making better choices, and that actors face social imperatives and thus imitate others to be like them. These explanations are traditionally addressed separately; in this paper, we suggest the possibility of within-setting shifts between them. We present evidence from two experiments (field and vignette), where providing information about both the prevalence of a behavior and its possible outcomes—versus information about prevalence only—led to different amounts and types of imitation. Results suggest that imitation results from actors inferring outcomes from prevalence information when outcome information was unavailable and from inferring legitimacy from the same prevalence when outcome information was provided.