Have you ever done something that you have regretted just to be accepted? When you follow the crowd you can get yourself into a uncomfortable position where you are not being honest with yourself. Mary Bender writes in the “Partying Habit That Can Put You In Danger,” doing what others do is a dangerous thing, One could be blinded to the truth of many possible dangerous situations when they follow their want! You can affect the people around you including friends and family. Desperation, extreme wanting, leads to the moral deconstruction of a person. It also can lead to falsifying your own image to impress others. In the article “The Partying Habit That Can Put You in Danger”, Bender explains and illustrates the dangers of consumption of alcohol and drinking games. The risks of partying are that you can't control how much alcohol is in your system at the time and the control is in other peoples hands(148). She says some students think you don’t want too drink to little or you’ll be considered a light drinker and you will be laughed at. With the games they play you are basically forced to drink to win. You are so focused on winning. You want to fit in. You are basically binge drinking without realizing it. It delivers …show more content…
People would do anything to be accepted, when your at a party and everyone is drinking,you feel like you would be called out, or teased. So you go against who you really are just to fit in, you don't want to be considered a outcast anymore, so you do what everyone else around you is doing. Once you try, either you are never going back or you keep trying to fit in, and once you fit it you don't want to go back. You keep doing bad behaviors to be accepted when it is not you. This can lead you to spiral downward because its a conflict with being accepted and who you really
Another point I agree with is that it's a lot easier to just fit in and not lead the train and being yourself. I personally know from experience. Growing up I always tried to conform just to fit in with the people that surrounded me. It's not just me that i've seen conform to fit in, i've seen many of my friends conform to fit in with the crowd. All around me, everyday people are conforming and changing to fit in with the society.
Furthermore, sometimes the desire to be accepted is stronger than prevailing conventions. This makes an individual to do things to make him feel accepted in the society. Krakauer compares the people in Alaska and McCandless. He writes, “And I’m sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in common with McCandless when they first got here, too, including many of his critics. Which maybe why they’re so hard on him. Maybe McCandless reminds them a little too much of their former selves” (Krakauer 221). In today’s society, an individual confirms itself to what a society wants and expect him or her to be.
Conformity means a change in one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. As a teenager, the pressure to conform to the societal “norm” plays a major role in shaping one’s character. Whether this means doing what social groups want or expect you to do or changing who you are to fit in. During class, we watched films such as Mean Girls, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Breakfast Club which demonstrate how the pressure to conform into society can change who you are. In the movies we have seen, conformity was most common during high school.
Everybody wants to be accepted, yet society is not so forgiving. It bends you and changes you until you are like everyone else. Society depends on conformity and it forces it upon people. In Emerson's Self Reliance, he says "Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater." People are willing to sacrifice their own hopes and freedoms just to get the bread to survive. Although the society that we are living in is different than the one the Emerson's essay, the idea of fitting in still exists today. Although society and our minds make us think a certain way, we should always trust our better judgment instead of just conforming to society.
were drinking to get drunk than their counterparts a decade earlier, and one recent study reported an increase, just since 1994, in the number of students who drink deliberately to get drunk? (Smith 1). I interviewed my friend Shelly Mitchell who recently turned twenty-one and asked her how she felt about finally being legal to drink. She quoted, ?It is not as exciting to drink anymore, I mean I still like to go out with my friends to bars, but the fun is all over, in high school and college it was so exciting trying to get alcohol by using a fake ID.? All of these factors could be changed by lowering the drinking age to eighteen. In a study done by the Harvard School of Public Health, binge drinking is defined as five drinks in a row for boys and four drinks for girls. And when they did a survey they found that 44% of the students attending Harvard binge drink (Jeffrey Kluger 1).
The feeling of being accepted is a feeling that everyone wants to feel and everyone goes throughout life in order to feel accepted by others. Nobody wants to feel like they are “on the outs” in life and nobody wants to feel as if others don’t approve of them, as that can be extremely detrimental to anybody’s’ self-esteem. I learned from this assignment that in life people often conform their beliefs in order to seem consistent with social norms. As I experienced when I didn’t conform to the “acceptable” and “normal” behaviors in society, people were extremely quick to judge me and it was very easy to observe that I was viewed as “weird” and “crazy” simply because I broke what was expected of me in society. During a critical analysis of the treatment of people who are different, break social norms, or march to the beat of their own drummer I was able to discover that conformity, compliance, and obedience is almost expected in society. It is expected that our behavior, perception, and opinions conform to social norms and when someone’s behaviors or opinions don’t conform to what’s normal it makes others around them uncomfortable and causes them to view that person as an outcast or part of an outgroup simply because someone isn’t living up to society’s expectations. In order to stay “accepted” in society we believe that
In the article The Desire To FIt in is the Root of All Wrongdoing by Christopher Freiman, the theme of fitting in, and how it's wrong is presented by a man who figured out people will do what you tell them if they feel lesser than you. All throughout the history we see mankind do wrongful acts but, why do we? Well, many people would say that the reason people do cruel things for others isn't because we “we care to little about others; it's that we care too much. To be more specific we care too much about how other view us, even if it means doing the wrong thing. The person doing wrong actions due to pressure in society is just as guilty as the person making them feel obligated. The reason people are willing to do this is because they “don't
Popularized with partying is drinking and drugs. This genre of ritual is usually due to the joining of a fraternity and sorority. Commonly, a majority of these are used as a way to haze and or initiate newcomers. In addition to using these substances, they abuse alcohol by taking part in binge drinking. Binge drinking is “the consumption of an excessive amount of alcohol in a short period of time.” Roughly half of the college students who drink do so along with binge drinking. "Students who are binge drinking with great frequency tend to be far more suicidal than their peers who are binge drinking less frequently or not at all," Most students feel pressured to drink until they black out entirely. With these means, room is left for a night that is not remembered. Fifty four percent of these students who binge drink have had memory loss in the past
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).
But why do I conform despite knowing I don't want to? In today’s society conformity is necessary to basically not be antisocial. If you don’t conform, you’re seen as “that weird guy” or maybe the person who never leaves home. Conformity is a basic need to live in society today. Some people are good at balancing their own values and society’s values, and some people become engulfed in their own values and have no regard for society’s or vice versa. Where do I fall in that spectrum? I think I succumb to society’s values over my own, but just a little bit. This is a constant fight between me, myself, and I, but it is also a new societal norm that everyone surprisingly
As once stated by John Lennon, “It’s weird not to be weird.” This quote encompasses the idea of trying to fit in and how people can be considered ‘weird’ if they do not fit in. This idea of fitting in can be described at conformity. Conformity being one’s behavior in accordance with socially accepted standards. Conformity can also be defined simply as “yielding to group pressures”. Group pressure can be in many forms, for example bullying, persuasion, teasing, etc. Conformity is brought about either by a desire to ‘fit in’ or be liked by others. This need can shape and often cloud our behavior, attitudes, and actions. It can also have many different psychological effects on an individual. The main psychological effects of trying to fit in include, but are not limited to, insanity, depression and anxiety, hostile behavior and petty
Binge drinking is defines as “consuming large quantities of alcohol in a single session” (drugfreeworld.org). This is a recipe for disaster. The idea of drinking a lot in a short amount of time is appealing to college students because they are “drinking to get drunk” (npr.org). This idea of drinking to get drunk is not a new one. The idea of changing one’s state of mind has been appealing to people for centuries. Whether it be drugs or alcohol or adrenaline seeking, people have been altering the chemical balance in their brain. The danger comes when this imbalance becomes frequent and severe. Binge drinking causes people to make decisions they would not normally make. These decisions can be as minor as kissing a girl you are strictly friends with or saying something offensive, or they can cause car crashes, alcohol poisoning, or other lethal injuries (cdc.gov). These are unintentional consequences to the seemingly harmless act of drinking alcohol. These consequences are the most prominent in teenagers and college students. This could be because of the undeveloped brain of people 18-24 years old. The decision making process is not fully
In our modern day society we have this perception that we must fit into a group. This is often seen through the potency of peer pressure in all levels of school, but largely during high school (AACAP). This can be done though subtle methods or even to the point of bullying a peer into doing something (Antoni Calvó-Armengol, 63). A more broad idea is also presented in the studies on mob mentality, where those who are in a large group will often follow what others are doing, and not always thinking about what is actually happening (Megan Donley). A large part of our current society is that those who are seen as different are put into a different group of people entirely. So we often pressure those or a pressured into a niche, but if we don’t
Everyone wants to be accepted in high school, each for different personal reasons. Some display ingratiation and change their views and behaviors to impress a certain group of people in order to be accepted into the group. Others are exposed to a groups ideas and arrogate those values as their own. Lastly, some may accept the views of a group in order to being accepted by them although they do not agree with the ideas privately. People in high school tend to conform to fit in with each other and gain their peers acceptance and not be considered “weird”. Social influences involve acting a particular way in order to be perceived as “normal” by the people around you. For most, it is crucially important to fit in with a peer group. The need for acceptance from a group tends to result in a teen trying to emulate the other members of the group, appearance and behavior being some of the
Succumbing to peer pressure stems from a lack of confidence, insecurities, and the undying actions to impress their peers and authoritative figures. Adolescents often feel compelled to step outside of his or her comfort zone to measure up to the “status quo” that has been created by modern society. The norm of today has made it acceptable to imitate acts that have been deemed as “cool”. The human condition naturally wants to group together for safety and security and to feel a part of something that is bigger than an individual. Often if an individual is too different from the peer group, he or she may no longer belong and may end up exiled from future endeavors within the group. Because of incidents and exiles such as this, people within a group will try to conform to group attitudes and behaviors and risk their own personal identities For example, children learn this trait a...