  Two main procedures characterize the way in which social actors evaluate the
qualities of the options in decision-making processes: they either seek to
evaluate their intrinsic qualities (individual learners), or they rely on the
opinion of the others (social learners). For the latter, social experiments
have suggested that the mathematical form of the probability of adopting an
option, called the conformity function, is symmetric in the adoption rate.
However, the literature on decision-making includes models where social
learners employ either symmetric or nonsymmetric conformity functions. We
generalize a particular case studied in a previous work, and we show
analytically that if the conformity function is symmetric, the details of the
probability distribution of the propensity of the agents to behave as a social
or an individual learner do not matter, only its expected value influences the
determination of the steady state. We also show that in this case, the same
steady state is reached for two extreme dynamical processes: one that considers
propensities as idiosyncratic properties of the agents (each agent being an
individual learner always with the same probability), and the opposite one,
which allows them to change their propensity during the dynamics. This is not
the case if the conformity function is nonsymmetric. This fact can inspire
experiments that could shed light on the debate about mathematical properties
of conformity functions.
