Chameleon Effect Essay

We have no control as to what we are born into, including our social status in the U.S and the color of our faces. Even though we do not have control over this we are automatically put into these social roles, “... a pattern of behavior that is expected of a person in a given setting or group.” (Spielman et al., 2014, p. 411) These social roles lead to “ingroups-outgroups”, “[a]n ingroup is a group that we identify with or see ourselves as belonging to. A group that we don’t belong to, or an out-group, is a group that we view as fundamentally different from us.” (Spielman et al., 2014, p. 434) Because we identify more with our ingroup we tend to be automatically biased against the outgroup.(Spielman et al., 2014) This can lead to conformity,

One reason is that behavior is contagious when we around others. Matching other people’s behavior when around them is called the Chameleon effect.(Spielman et al., 2014) This has been studied by Solomon Asch, where he looked to see the influence of group conformity. In his study, more than one third of the participants choose obviously wrong answers to conform with the rest of the group's answers. (Spielman et al., 2014) This can be seen as very troubling, because we conform to groups we can easily be influenced to do wrong things just because the group is participating in it. Obedience to authority is a specific type of conformity, shown through Stanley Milgram’s study. His study included putting participants in a position to following orders from someone that causing harm for someone else. He was looking to see how far participants would go to follow orders. Sixty-five percent of the participants went all the way thinking they were harming someone. (Spielman et al., 2014) Although the United States has taken into account conformity in the voting process, it has not made an effective way to decrease conformity in schools and other social situations. People can lose their sense of self when they conform to groups, this is called deindividuation. It can be seen in cyber bullying and people being in a fraternity, people want to fit in and be apart of a group. When people shed their self-awareness they become more

When we do this we assume individual characteristics, this is called stereotyping. (Spielman et al., 2014) An example of stereotyping would be seeing an Asian and assuming they are very smart. Studies have shown that members of various racial groups tend to perceive members of other racial groups as more alike. (Spielman et al., 2014) This can coincide with the other-race-effect, this says that we easily recognize individual differences in faces of members in our own groups than we do of other groups. (Spielman et al., 2014) These two studies show that we stereotype looks of other races and can assume things about that racial group. Stereotyping can cause people to believe the just world hypothesis, where people think good things happen to good people while bad things happen to bad people. When we stereotype we proceed to keep that barrier between people. When we separate ourselves from people we get the idea one of us is better than the other. Media also come to play with stereotyping, because they feul stereotypes through stories. There are multiple newscast in the United States and they make a subtle view on certain things drawing some audience member and push away