The word conformity comes from the Latin words con, which means with or together, and forma, which means to shape or mold. Conformity is a concept referring to the often unhesitant acts displayed by human individuals constantly in the public realm, in attempt to mold together with the dominant social groups behaviors, beliefs, and expectations. When an individual is not one with the crowd, there is an increased likelihood they will be seen as deviant. Human individuals are social beings and grow uncomfortable when they are not accepted from social groups and others around them. The phenomenon of conformity has boggled minds of social psychological researchers for years. As a group, we chose to join those who have researched and experimented with conformity by reviewing scholarly literature on the topic and also designing our own experiment. Our purpose is to research further into variables that others have concluded will result in an individual conforming such as internal psychological needs and the important of the sociological contexts that the acts partake in. While researching we have also kept in mind that our experiment is an updated version of a previous one and will have different variables such as technology, individualism, and the age of respondents. Muzafer Sherif’s experiment on conformity is one which caught the attention of our group, and one we wished to replicate for this project. His experiment involved an illusion of light known as the autokinectic effect, and the placement of an individual into a group with confederates that were all assigned the similar task of responding their estimate of distance a light has moved in inches while they sat in a dark room. Individuals may conform to objects that take the extern...
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... judgments. An important part of this experiment is the re-testing of participants after the group experiment trials individually, and how most had conformed to the judgment they had recently made in the group. After the group experience those individuals who had preciously answered two to six inches was more likely to say the light had moved four inches. This shows how individuals were influenced by the group experience, whether they realized it or now and had increased their conformity to group norms throughout the trials. Group norms are the agreed-upon standards of behavior and are established by interactions between individuals had leveled off extreme opinions. Sherif’s experiment resulted in this finding of individuals conforming to group norms and the consensus agreement that is most likely a compromise, even if the consensus agreement is not right. (Dewey).
Conformity is defined as the occurrence of people yielding to social pressures as a result of pressure from a group of their peers; when faced by the pressure to conform, people will alter their behaviour and actions to fit the norm demonstrated by their peers (Lilienfield et al., 2012). Conformity is studied so that is can be understood and used in society to facilitate positive outcomes, and help avoid situations where peoples’ predisposition to conform leads to negative consequences (Lilienfield et al., 2012). By understanding conformity and other social processes society as a whole is able to understand themselves better and motivates them to work on improving as a whole (Lilienfield et al., 2012).
The 1950’s have received a reputation as an age of political, social and cultural conformity. This reputation is rightfully given, as with almost every aspect of life people were encouraged to conform to society. Conforming is not necessarily a negative thing for society, and the aspects of which people were encouraged to conform in the 1950’s have both negative and positive connotations.
Many people have trouble being apart of a society. These troubles come from trying to fit in, which is also known as conforming. Another trouble is trying to express one’s own style with one’s own opinion. This is a trouble due to the fact that many people have the fear of being frowned upon when being the black sheep of the group if one’s opinion does not correspond with other opinions. This is where one’s own sense of who they are, individuality, and trying to fit in, conformity, can get confused. A nickname for conformity is “herd behavior” which is the name of an article where the author relates animals that herd with people that conform. Many people have a different philosophy of this topic which will be expressed in this essay. An important
In 1951, Solomon Asch carried out several experiments on conformity. The aim of these studies was to investigate conformity in a group environment situation. The purpose of these experiments was to see if an individual would be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. Asch believed that conformity reflects on relatively rational process in which people are pressured to change their behaviour. Asch designed experiments to measure the pressure of a group situation upon an individual judgment. Asch wanted to prove that conformity can really play a big role in disbelieving our own senses.
As people socialize, they create interactions whose products are influential to act back upon the people to determine or constrain actions. Moreover, social interactions may be likened to a theatre whereby people are the actors as the rest of the people are the audience. These other people actively observe the role-playing and respond by reacting to the performances. However, people’s behaviors tend to change when they are alone as they get rid of the roles they play in front of others.
(Myers, 651) It is the result of the human need and desire to fit in and not stray from societal standards. After Solomon Asch’s experiments, it became evident that there was a certain discomfort affiliated with being outside of the group’s popular idea that causes the uncomfortable person to conform to the ideas of the group. This is more likely if the group has more than three people, they are unanimous, and they are admired by the conforming person. Social influence is also a contributing factor as to why people conform. Roles and norms are set out for society and make it hard for people to veer from them. The normative social influence causes people to follow these norms to avoid their drastic fear of being left out. (Myers, 653) Another type of social influence would be the informational social influence, which results in people adopting others’ opinions and beliefs of the world around them. These two influences show the ominous presence of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In order to satisfy a person’s higher level needs, such as self-actualization and esteem, the lower level needs must first be met, such as hunger and safety. (Myers, 330) A low level need is belongingness. People want to feel like they belong and feel loved in order to avoid isolation. This desire is one factor that directly causes conformity. In order to avoid being left out and lonely, a person willingly accepts another person’s opinions and thoughts even if they are the opposite of their own or if they know they are wrong. Conformity is due to the person being in an unfamiliar situation, being ignorant on the topic, wanting to impress and be liked by the members of the group, and being willing to conform their opinion on themselves. (Zimbardo, 2006) To avoid conformity, the person must identify what their actual
Conformity also causes a conflict in identity causing people to feel labeled by the society. In Source G, the writer states that “society is no reader to accept crippledness than to accept death, war, sex, sweat, or wrinkles. I would never refer to another person a cripple. It is the name I use to name only myself.” The writer also states “people- crippled or not- wince at the word ‘cripple,’ as they do not at ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled.’” Another example is a visual source; Source D. The image is of a Muslim women wearing a traditional headpiece that represents her religion. The headpiece is a design of the American flag. Her facial expression is plain and very unpleasant and on her forehead is a large imprint of the word “terrorist” in black, bold ink. Above the image, it states “my
Conformity seems to be the new silent killer. More and more people are choosing to conform rather than be themselves. Conformity is spread across the world and in our generation it’s starting to spread like a wildfire in dead grass. In the article “The Sociology of Leopard Man” by Logan Fey, Logan argues that conformity is becoming one of the world’s most dangerous psychological disorders. I will share my position and provide my own experience in terms of how I classify non-conformist and conformists.
Conformity is shaped in a number of ways for a number of reasons. Utopian and dystopian societies, both display structures that promote different types of conformity. Within the community individuals and government is influenced. Establishing norms and laws lays out for the citizens what is expected of them. A society’s make-up consisting of the individuals and government is both positively and negatively affected by the formation of conformity.
The most basic concept in social psychology is conformity. Conformity is the idea that behaviour or a belief is changed in order to follow, or conform, to what is considered the “norm.” One of the oldest experiments to support this notion was conducted in 1935 by Muzafer Sherif (Song, Ma, Wu, Li, 2012 p. 1366). There are two different types of
In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice and Benedict rant about marriage for most of the beginning of the play, while Claudio raves about how wonderful it will be being married to Hero. Yet in the end, Claudio exchanges his marriage to Hero for an opportunity to bash her in public, while Beatrice and Benedick marry despite that they were mortal enemies for most of the first three acts. How did the situation swing around to this degree? Beatrice and Benedick had been using the most extreme metaphors to demonstrate their scorn of each other and of marriage, and Claudio had been doing the same to demonstrate his love of Hero. Not only did none of these three characters mean what they were saying, but meant the reverse, and the people that plotted to bring them together or pull them apart plotted because they understood on some level what each really wanted.
As stated above, conformity changes an individual 's belief and behaviour to match the groups, and while obedience often requires punishment and reward other studies suggest that "an individual...confronted with an authority recognized as legitimate, will behave in the direction of the expectations of this authority" (Pascual et al., 2013) without long-term effect on behaviour or beliefs. Sherif (as cited by Myers, 2014) found in his studies on norm formation that the group norm lasted even a year after the initial experiments, while Milgram (as cited by Myers, 2014) found physical proximity of the authority figure was a predictor of obedience in that obedience went down the further the authority figure physically was. Though conformity and obedience are not completely different, conformity obedience can be interchangeable when the hierarchy is seen as a group with which individuals can identify. Reicher, Haslam and Smith (2012) argue that Milgram 's (1965, 1974) famous obedience experiment isn 't simply blind obedience but individuals identifying with the figure of authority and conforming to expected norms. In some cases when individuals felt the authority figure 's beliefs were dissimilar to their own they immediately withdrew from
Elliot Aronson (2012) provides a definition of conformity, two social psychological processes that underlie a conformity and cited examples of reasons why people conform in the book, The Social Animal. Aronson (2012) defines a conformity as “a change in a person’s behavior or opinion as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people” (p.19). In accordance with Aronson’s (2012) definition of conformity, people do conform owing to the social influence, which are two main social psychological processes: belonging and getting information.
There are many social influences which have an effect or lasting effect on the behavior of an individual. Within many group scenarios, conformity and obedience play a large role in how people tend to think and behave, especially if they get carried away. Obedience refers to compliance to an authority figure or with others in a group. On the other hand, conformity refers to an individual changing their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors to accommodate with the standards of a group or their peers. Both of which are pure examples of how human behavior changes based on certain social situations. Obedience and conformity both occur during situations of social facilitation, social loafing, and groupthink.
On a daily basis, people are being influenced by the people around them, whether it is directly or indirectly. A person’s thoughts, feelings and actions can influence and be influenced by society. These social interactions provide enough opportunity for the presence of people to influence and change behavior, views, and attitudes of an individual. There are several forms of social influences, such as conformity, which I will be discussing. Why we conform has been a topic of considerable interest to social psychologists in particular such as he classic and well-known studies of Muzafer Sherif and Solomon Asch. In addition to researching why we conform, there’s also the question of whether conformity is good or bad.