It is well established that the decisions that we make can be strongly influenced by the behaviour of others. However, testing how social influence can lead to non-compliance with conservation rules during an individual's decision-making process has received little research attention. We synthesise advances in understanding of conformity and rule-breaking in individuals and in groups, and take a situational approach to studying the social dynamics and ensuing social identity changes that can lead to non-compliant decision-making. We focus on situational social influence contagion that are copresent (i.e., same space and same time) or trace-based (i.e., behavioural traces in the same space). We then suggest approaches for testing how situational social influence can lead to certain behaviours in non-compliance with conservation rules.
Keywords: biodiversity conservation; cognition; group dynamics; rule violations; social networks; social norms.
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