Crowd Conformity Essay

Conformity, the act of mimicking a groups behavior, attitudes, or beliefs. Is this a positive or negative thing? Others may say that it's a positive thing because it was the foundation of modern laws, but that was a very long time ago, does this positive light on conformity still apply? Conformity is a negative thing because the Holocaust, Tessie Hutchinson was stoned to death, and the mere presence of friends influences risk taking, and all three of these examples start with the same thing, Conformity.

In psychology, conformity is defined as the alteration of one’s beliefs and behaviors to better match those around you. There are typically two different forms of conformity, normative and informational. Normative conformity is becoming compliant to group pressure with the want to fit in. On the other hand, Information conformity refers to when a person looks to the group for guidance when they lack knowledge in a certain area. Conformity also can range in different levels such as from how people dress to how people act in public. This force is what drives even the most simple of decisions that a person will make on a daily basis. As a result, these individuals conform to other people’s behaviors. For example, just like a public compliance, which is when a person conforms to another’s behavior even if they do not necessarily believe or agree of the person’s words or actions. In society, conformity puts pressure on citizens to either conform to the laws they are given or face legal consequences. Conformity creates something called “group norms”, which are an informal set of social rules that are often unspoken. (Group Norms) When a person violates these norms, they will often find themselves in conflict with the rest of the group, and can potentially be removed.

Conformity is a concept that has been heavily researched in the field of social psychology. Conformity is defined as a change in behavior, beliefs, and attitudes due to group pressure perceived as real (encompassing the presence of others) or imagined (encompassing the pressure of social standards) (Myers, 2010, p. 192). The concept of conformity is a powerful influence on the tendency for people to arrange their thoughts, perspectives, and ideas with others, especially when in a group. This takes away from a person’s individuality because they want to feel accepted by others and therefore, a person will accomplish this basic need of approval through conforming.

Human beings are defined as ''social animals'' because in every aspects of life they live together, they form a variety of groups and improve relationships with each other. Interaction with others is a natural result of living in society. In the process of interaction, society and its rules has a social impact on each individual. If people face with any kind of social impact such as group pressure, great part of them show conformity by changing their behaviors, ideas, decisions in expected way. A person conforms if he or she chooses a course of action that a majority favors or that is socially acceptable. Some kind of conformity is natural and socially healthy but obeying all the norms, ideas, and decisions without thinking or accepting

Conformity is a type of social influence which involves a change in behaviour and belief of a minority to fit in with the group concerning real or imagined group pressures. This behaviour could be defined as the pressure to behave in ways that are viewed as acceptable by a particular group, brought about either by a desire to ‘fit in’ or be liked. The main factor that influences conformity are social norms. Social Norms are a pattern of expected behaviour in certain situations either implicitly or explicitly. Conformity exists in two categories, normative influence where the individual’s desire is to gain social approval and acceptance from the group to make a favourable impression. And informational social influence where a person is looking for guidance in an ambiguous situation as the individual listens to other member 's views and opinions to be guided to an answer. Conformity is distinguished in three different types; Compliance is the most superficial type of conformity. It refers to a person who conforms publicly with the views and attitudes expressed by the group but still continue to privately disagree. This temporary short term behavioural change which often results normative social influence. For example, It is a student 's first day of college, but has arrived late and missed the induction to which he doesn 't know where to go. He then sees a group of students filing off towards a corridor and

Conformity refers to the likelihood that an individual will follow the unspoken rules or behaviors of the social group to which they belong. In the short video clip titled “Asch Conformity Experiment”, we learned that people can feel pressured into abnormal behavior because of the unanimity of the majority.

According to Aronson (1985), conformity is “a change in a person’s opinion or behaviour as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or a group of people”.

Conformity, compliance with others, and standards, rules or laws and behavior in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards. Non conformity, Failure or refusal to conform to a prevailing rule or practice. These were the topic we talked about in my English II CP class. We read a lot of articles about nonconformity and conformity and watched videos on YouTube of experiments on the topic; One of the videos we watched was the elevator experiment where they tested if majority of random people would conform or not conform to what the group of actors in the elevator were doing. What they did to test this was they put a group of actors in a elevator facing the back of the elevator with a video camera and see when random people walked in the elevator if they would conform and face the same way the actors were out of pressure. Or if they did not conform. In this experiment majority ended up conforming. At the end of the video all the random people that participated were asked why they faced the same way the group of actors were.

Conformity is the social process by which people in a group or in a social circle engage in behaviour which appears to be socially acceptable, that is they go along with the social expectations apparent at the time. One of the key factors in conformity, however, is yielding to group pressure, as defined by Mann (1969):

According to one website ‘Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group.’. (Saul McLeod, 2016). People is very susceptible to the action or opinions of majority and imitate their action unconsciously. I think this is because people have tendency the action which the majority taken is correct. If they are an only person who takes action which is different from others, the might think ‘Am I wrong?’. After they think so, they imitate others. One famous experiment done by Asch is known as example of conformity. It shows 1/3 to 1/2 of the subjects make a judgment contrary to objective fact and in conformity with the

Conforming to a group or a person is a form of social influence. A video written by Kathleen Yale called ¨Crash Course: Psychology ´Episode 38: Social Influence´¨ explains what conformity is by saying, ¨conformity describes how we adjust our behavior or thinking to follow the behavior or rules of the group we belong to.¨ An experiment was given to five volunteers to show if they would pick the same wrong answer as the group they are in just to fit in. The results read, ¨In the end most subjects still gave what they knew was the correct answer, but more than a third were essentially willing to give the wrong answer to mesh with the group¨ (Yale, Kathleen). Research has also shown that people conform for multiple reasons. Kathleen Yale gives

Once someone starts talking about conformity we all think to ourselves about how we are never a conformist, we never conform, and we stand out from others. Though, this is false. In fact, everyone conforms almost always

Conformity is a type of social influence which involves a change in behaviour and belief of a minority to fit in with the group concerning real or imagined group pressures. This behaviour could be defined as the pressure to behave in ways that are viewed as acceptable by a particular group, either by a desire to ‘fit in’ or be liked. The main factor that influences conformity are social norms. Social Norms are a pattern of expected behaviour in certain situations either implicitly or explicitly. Conformity exists in two categories, normative influence where the individual’s desire is to gain social approval and acceptance from the group to make a favourable impression. And informational social influence where a person is looking for guidance in an ambiguous situation as the individual listens to other member 's views and opinions to be guided to an answer. Conformity is distinguished in three different types; Compliance is the most superficial type of conformity. It refers to a person who conforms publicly with the views and attitudes expressed by the group but still continue to privately disagree. This temporary short term behavioural change which often results normative social influence. For example, It is a Primary 7 's first day of school, a pupil has arrived late and missed the induction to which he doesn 't know where to go. He then sees a group of pupilss filing off towards a corridor and

The term conformity is often used to indicate an agreement to the majority position, brought about either by a desire to ‘fit in’ or be liked (normative) or because of a desire to be correct (informational), or simply to conform to a

Group size is important because as Asch (1955) found, the larger the group, the bigger the phenomenon of conformity due to social norms. Group cohesiveness makes the group to have greater bonds due to similarity and ability to easily show empathy to each other (Christensen et al., 2004) and social support is noticed to groups with higher levels of cohesiveness and bonding. On the other hand, there are personal factors affecting the type of conformity such as self-awareness (ability to understand own self), self-presentation (try to present ideal self in order to conform), personal control (desire to feel that one has control, as a human right, over particular situations) and gender (gender differences- women are more likely to conform) (Franzoi, 2009).