An Essay About Conformity

According to Margaret Drabble, ¨Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts,¨ a theme which has been proven in the short stories ¨Shooting an Elephant¨ by George Orwell, ¨The Lottery¨ by Shirley Jackson, and ¨Who Killed Benny Paret¨ by Norman Cousins. Each story displays a different type of conformity, but they all illustrate people disrespecting the objective facts leading to disregarding the result of destruction or loss.

In the article title “Individuality vs. Conformity: The Healthy Middle?” by an anonymous high school student it says that there are only two thing that a typical high school student wants to typically achieve in their short high school life (par. 1). One of these things is to fit in (par. 2). The second one is to be different (par. 3). How could you do this?. You could choose to be individual or just conform. However I really maintain the idea that what we should really do it's to stay in the middle so we won't forget who we really are and still be liked by different groups of people.

The statement “Conformity is a jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth,” was spoken by John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, in an attempt to boost American morale. The idea that is being conveyed is that conformity limits freedom, inspiration, and independence, which are the traits that brought the United States to where it is now. Conformity, defined as acting in order and in compliance with social behavior and law, is an extremely ambiguous term, but it means that creativity and originality can be lost due to the standards set by authoritative figures. Many works of literature share the common connection that runs through all of their collective plots and express the dangers of agreeing with society. In Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible, the theocratic community of Salem is engulfed by hysteria over witchcraft and is reluctantly led to oppose the court’s defense of the truth. In the Scientific American article “Why Are We So Afraid of Creativity?” by Maria Konnikova, she concludes that people try not to get imaginative due to societal restrictions that clash with their ambitions, which results in people that are compelled to repress their creative urges under the greater authority, and to never be very productive, as society has its fears of the extent of creativity. The Apple Macintosh Commercial “1984” tries to sell Macintoshes by persuading that these products will stray from the drab and conventional style of the 1980s and bring

I have always believed that you have a choice in this world. When I was a child, I used to think “The more you look like other people, The more people will like you”. Although I should know better by now, I cannot help believing I should have copied people when I should have been myself that whole time. At the same time that I believed in coping other people, I also believed it was wrong to confirmed and everyone liked me but I didn't even like myself. I started to hate myself.

Jinato Hu once said, “Diversity in the world is a basic characteristic of human society, and also the key condition for a lively and dynamic world as we see today.” Without the range of individuals in the world every person would be exactly the same. The claim “the world would be a better place if more people were like you” raises the question of to what extent does individuality overpower conformity. The statement requires us to view the world as a group of different and unique individuals or as a community where everyone is the same. Therefore, to a large extent individuality overpowers conformity proving that the claim “the world would be a better place if more people were like you” would not be true of me.

Conformity is a highly powerful being. Conformity alone can destroy entire civilizations, crush large empires, and cause many of the world’s greatest leaders to fall. But conformity exists in varying degrees from that which persuades a child to bully a peer to that which convinces a politician to act on an issue like the rest of his party. Yet, no matter how great the degree of conformity, there is always an essence on the inside that causes one to question the acts they perform. It is that tension that arises between conformity and inward questioning that makes a human human. Imagine a society where everyone conformed; there would be no individualism and freedom of expression. But imagine a world where everyone questioned; the world would

Did their wrong answers influence the other group members’ responses? The results of the experiment showed that seventy-five percent of the people went along with whatever answer was given by the majority of the group. The results of this experiment are very shocking, not everyone wants to admit that they conform but the most of us do. This can be applied to just about any situation, but the first situation that pops into my mind is peer pressure. Many teenagers and even young adults have been peer pressured into positions that they could not see their way out of, or thought it was okay as long as everyone else was doing it. The power of conformity is so influential on the grounds that fear of public ridicule or humiliation one may feel if they do not conform, is so strong.

Conformity is the act of changing your behavior to match the behaviors of others (Kenrick ,179). We are closing in on the end of the U.S. presidential election, and in less than four months I will go to the polls with many others of my peers and vote. As a fourth year political science major I have a firm grasp of how to research candidates but in the earlier part of the year I did not have time, as I had a twenty-hour schedule. Yet when my friends started talking about Bernie sanders I felt pressure to add my voice in the mix but I did not know much about any of the Democratic Party candidates, excepting Hilary Clinton. In response I copied what my friends were saying, I allowed their opinions to shape mine and in doing so I gave up my individual choice to better fit what my group of friends was choosing. Eventually I sat down and formed my own opinions through research. I question how many citizens vote based on their own research or if they vote based on how

Do we conform? Five paragraph essay quiz. In our society in the day and age, we have thousands of things to form opinions about on a day to day basis. But larger than those are the things that we form opinions on that define us. These include political issues, religion, and views on society and how it functions.

Most people tend to just “follow the crowd” and go along with whatever everyone else is doing. People tend to go along with what other people are doing because they’re afraid of being different and that they might be judged too. The book To Kill a Mockingbird shows this very well. In the book no one in the town of Maycomb knew Tom personally except the lawyer defending him. The only person who liked Tom was the only person who got to know him. Everyone in the town would hear about how bad of a person he was and all the bad things he has done and with every person that would find hear something, the story of what really happened would get even more and more exaggerated. It influences people’s decisions of what things are like so they can never find out by themselves.

Social psychology plays an important role in aspects of our everyday lives from the decisions we make to shaping our personality and behaviour. In this paper I will discuss a pressing example of one which is latest and most controversial presedential election that occurred in November at the resulting actions of the American people. These psychological concepts played a crucial role in many ways such as molding the voters’ minds which determined their actions and behaviours and playing on the psychology of the candidate’s opponents to gain the upper hand. The concepts I will discuss are the primacy vs recency effect, conformity, and various techniques in persuasion. Finally I will talk about how these techniques could be resisted and a more global use of these factors.

Obedience and conformity have big impacts on the way we respond to our social groups and authority. Whether we have different opinions or fears from them, we tend to change our minds and go along with everyone else to fit in and be the norm. Social pressure, while it may not be talked about often, is something we deal with in our everyday lives and seem to have conformed to it as

Y. Cho _ O.-B. Chung (&) Department of Home Economics Education, Korea University, An investigation on the relationship between conformative peer bullying and issues of peer conformity among adolescents. Anam-dong Seongbuk-Gu, Seoul 136-701, Korea.

First, every individual has a desire to be correct. An individual stands to be correct and accurate in both their observations and judgments. It’s often, one depends on the social cues that are around to help in making interpretations of a given situation. It’s observed that, when a task that is not difficult is imposed to an individual, their morale to correctly do the task lessens the effect of a pressure from a group that answers it wrongfully (Basil 264). Even though each person answers differ, the subject knows the correct answer and feels less pressure to side with the group

Conformity defined by Saul McLeod is, “Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group. This change is in response to real (involving the physical appearance of others) or imagined (involving the pressure of social norms/expectations) group pressure.” (McLeod, 2007, para. 1 & 2). Meaning, that an individual has the desire to change themselves either mentally or physically to meet the social status quo. Reflecting back on one’s childhood, the mentality that always seemed to make itself present was being a leader and not a follower, regardless of the situation or aspect. It seemed to commonly be followed by, “if (whoever at time) jumped off a bridge would one follow”? One remembers badly wanting a different hairstyle or to dress a particular way because everyone else had it or was doing it. However, one also remembers the individuals that did not try to conform to anything just because everyone was doing it or it was the fad at the time, those individuals might have been viewed as the rebels. As one has gotten older, looking back it is almost as if it should have been the rebels that were the ones everyone was envious of. Personally, however,