Abstract This paper examines the impacts of conformity tendencies (including conformity to rich villagers, conformity to relatives, conformity to neighbors and conformity to village cadres) on households’ willingness to adopt energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas in rural areas in China. Particularly, to address estimation errors caused by possible sample self-selection biases, propensity score matching is employed to further ensure the robustness of the regression results obtained by Binary Logistic model. The empirical results highlight that, in contrast to the significantly negative impact of conformity to rich villagers, conformity to relatives, neighbors and village cadres all have positive and statistically significant influences on households’ willingness to adopt energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas. These findings suggest the potential importance of providing households with quick and convenient access to the relatives’, neighbors’ and village cadres’ adoption information of energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas but carefully filtering out rich villagers’ adoption information in promoting energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas in rural areas.