Is Conformity to Group Norms a Good or Bad Thing? Essay

According to Webster Dictionary, conformity is defined as, “in compliance of rules, laws, or standards.” Mark Twain’s, “Cone-pone Opinions,” demonstrates how society reacts to new conformities; individuals eventually conform to popular ideas and inevitably abandon these ideas for something greater. Twain states, “It is our nature to conform; it is force which not many can successfully resist.” (Twain 2). The reason people conform is not for self-approval, but rather, for the approval of others.

Conformity refers to an individual’s behavior that is performed because of group pressure, even though that pressure might not involve a direct request. Many people want to think that they are conformist enough so that they are not looked upon as strange to others and nonconformist enough to demonstrate that they are capable of thinking by themselves. For many years, psychologists have been interested in human conformity. Usually when people are in groups, they behave according to how those in the group behave. That indicates that conformity can affect a person’s behavior and make a person do things that may be against their ethics, attitudes, and morals. The study of

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 form of social influence, when we conform we act and think like members of our group. Often people even alter or change their personal beliefs to match those around them. When we conform we feel pressured to fit in with others, to be a part of the majority. While we may still have contradicting beliefs towards things, we change our behaviors and actions to match what everybody else is

In social psychology, and more importantly sociology, groupthink is a process by which members of a cohesive group arrive at a decision that many individual members privately believe it is unwise. Jonestown is an example of what can be considered dangerous conformity. The members of the Peoples Temple originally thought being in the organization was the right thing to do and they were making the right choices, but that day they followed their leader in drinking the cyanide Kool-Aid, some thought the ideas were unwise. Even though the members of the cult were questioning the idea in their head, they followed along with their leader. They never had a thought that Jones would do anything like what happened that

To understand why we have a sense of conformity, we must first understand value. “Values are used to learn people’s culture, ideas, and what they want out of life (Henslin 49). Every culture has similar and different values. “Norms are the expectations a group develops concerning the ‘right’ way to reflects its values” (Henslin49). An example of a norm would be personal space and speaking quietly in certain places such as a library. When norms are violated people often begin to question the person’s sanity and well-being based on how extreme the norm violation was.

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

“Groupthink being a coinage - and, admittedly, a loaded one - a working definition is in order. We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity - it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity - an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well (p. 114).”

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.

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):

There is a fundamental human need to belong to social groups especially if people were to live and work together, it is likely that they need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours in order to get along and fit-in. Thus, we learnt to conform to rules of other people, the more people see others behaving in a particular way or making particular decisions, the more likely people will feel obliged to follow the suit. This is called conformity and can be defined in different ways, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2014) stated it is the changing of one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. According to Deutsch and Gerard (1955), social influence should be distinguished into two types, the informational social influence and normative social influence. The occurrence of social influence has implied to many real life events, which has drawn many researchers to attention. This has lead many researchers to design distinct experiments to try and understand the cause of the conformity, whether conformity is situation dependent, and whether we are able to resist social influences.

The term groupthink in this report is defined as, the social psychological phenomenon that results in groups during pressure situations. This social psychology theory is broken down into eight signs. Illusion of invulnerability, Collective rationalization, Belief in inherent morality, Stereotyped views of out-groups, Direct pressure on dissenters, Self-censorship, Illusion of unanimity, Self-appointed “mindguards”. According to research conducted by Irving Janis, there are three conditions to groupthink. The first, "high group cohesiveness" which is the direction for a group to be in unity while working towards a goal, or to satisfy the emotional needs of its members. Secondly, the structural faults such as insulation of the group, lack

In pyschology conformity can be descibed as an indiviual’s tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviours of the social group to which he/she belongs to or wants to be apart of. Many psychologists including , Jenness (1932), Sherif (1935) both experimented in psychology, investigating conformity and group pressure. However, perhaps the most famous conformity experiment was done by Solomon Asch (1951) and his line judgment experiment. (McLeod 2007)

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).