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An Essay About Conformity

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Conformity Essay In society, people enjoy rallying behind characters who lead rebellions and revolutions in pop culture, but in real life many prefer those who don’t “rock the boat” even to the point of ignoring objective facts. Peer pressure, self-preservation, and a desire to be like everyone else are the reasons people conform when they have objective facts to say they shouldn’t. In many instances peer pressure causes people to go against objective facts that they know to be true. On the game show Divided, contestants must all lock in the same answer to trivia questions, the faster they do it the more money they receive. I’ve seen an episode before where one person knew the correct answer, but everyone else was sure it was something else. The incorrect people eventually convinced the person with the correct answer to change their response to what everyone else had. This lead to the team getting the question wrong; if the correct person had argued their point further, then the team could have had more money. In one experiment ordinary people had to listen to a person sitting in a different room repeating a list of words. If the person repeating the words messed up the test subject was told to press a button, following the button a scream could be heard. Each time the person …show more content…

In society there is a history of those who go against societal norms facing punishments. One example is Galileo; after making many discoveries about our planet and outer space Galileo was eager to get this new information to everyone. The church- mad that he was preaching things that wasn’t in the Bible- killed him as a punishment. Despite the fact that Galileo was correct in his knowledge, the church thought he couldn’t possibly be correct, because they only believed what was in the bible and what Galileo was saying was something

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