From Stanford Business:
A new working paper by Neil Malhotra of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and David Rothschild of Microsoft Research, shows that some voters do, in fact, switch sides in an effort to feel accepted and to be part of a winning team. But the paper also concludes that greater numbers of voters are searching for the "wisdom of crowds" when they evaluate poll results, and that the opinion of experts matters more to them than that of their peers.
The researchers asked a selected group of voters to state their opinions on a variety of real public policy questions, and then presented them with fabricated poll results on the same topics. When the test subjects learned that a large number of experts favored a position, opinions shifted by 11.3%. But the "opinions of people like me" changed opinions by just 6.2%, while a general poll saying that a majority of people favored one side or the other moved the needle by 8.1%.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-polls-influence-behavior
