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 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.

In a paper published in [month TK] in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, Denton, SFI External Professor Marcus Feldman, and independent researcher Jonathan F. Johannemann build on this previous theoretical modeling work by testing the model against real-world data.