Redefined conformity model beats averaging in five real-world tests of opinion dynamics

Imagine you poll your friends on how many minutes per pound to roast a turkey.

Five respond with 15 minutes; one answers 33 minutes.

The most popular model of conformity, the French-Harary-DeGroot model (or more commonly, DeGroot model), assumes that you would carefully weigh all six recommendations, calculating a cooking time of 18 minutes per pound.

But under a model of conformity previously published by SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton and colleagues, you would disregard the outlier and move ahead with 15. ...