First read about this on Para Pundit, relevant link here.

If you follow the pack are you more likely to co-operate with others in it? Not necessarily according to research into social behaviour by academics at the University of East Anglia.

The study, published in the August issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, shows that people who do not conform are most likely to work together for the greater good, while conforming to social norms can actually make people less likely to co-operate – a finding which surprised the researchers and could have implications in the workplace for team design and operations management.

"Here we've got a measure of people's co-operation, which could apply to any situation where you've two or more people who are trying to co-operate in an activity. For example in a work setting, if you are part of a team working on a project you expect everyone to put the same effort in to the task. The expectation is that people who are high in social desirability will conform to the effort other people are putting into the task, but actually the conforming people may be less helpful because they take their cue from the less helpful members of the team. They are conforming to the person who is not necessarily working that hard."