Essay about On Conformity and Obedience

We conform to society by following the pack. Sadly, to say the reason why we conform to society is primary due to the reason of being petrified of being left behind, not loved, afraid of the opinions of others, and our true self. We value the outlook of others more than ourselves, for the reason that we want to fit in. We value cosmetics, the latest fashion trend, and luxury more than our true sense of love and freedom. Individuals of all ages are ball and chained to a standard which cannot be a hundred percent attainable by honesty no living being.Society will dictate our everyday life as a matter of fact, unless we take the stand and tell ourselves: the only sense of validation I need in my life is my own.

This essay will cover topics on Psychopathology, conformity as an effective behavioral response, as well as touch on three different bias, the self-centered bias, the unassuming bias, and the group-serving bias. Psychopathology is defined as the origin of mental disorders, the symptoms they reveal themselves as, and how they develop. In this essay, I will be going over 2 perspectives on Psychopathology. They are the Relativist Perspective, and the Universalist Perspective. The Relativist Perspective revolves around how different cultures define, explain, and develop treatments for mental disorders. The Universalist Perspective, however, centers around the idea that each mental disorder has a “constant”. This constant doesn’t change,

As a student, I am often troubled by the rigid routines of the school day, despite the fact that I am actually a very habitual person. The constant ringing of bells, lectures, bellwork, classwork, homework, each a daily practice throughout the school year. Although all of these components promote conformity, which will ultimately support the balance of school and societal norms, they also tend to threaten each student’s own unique characteristics. This then poses the question; to what degree should schools encourage conformity versus individuality? Certainly, a level of conformity is required to achieve a balanced society however, the overall structure of the school day and class, including the methods used to teach and mandatory classes,

There were often drills or rituals performed in the society, such as a suicide drill. During suicide drills, the people were woken in the middle of the night and were told to drink a “poisonous liquid”. After drinking it, the people were told they were not going to die, they had succeeded a loyalty test. Jones did those tests because he was afraid of a conspiracy against him.

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.” As human beings, we always encounter the critical decision in our daily lives of whether to pursue individuality or conformity in various situations. Although I believe that individuality is certainly more powerful than conformity, I noticed that many ignore the necessity of harmony between individualism and conformity. If individuality is absolutely more powerful to the point that we should never accept conformity, then should we avoid conforming to the laws of our country and instead commit multiple crimes simply because we want to? On the other

Research Into Obedience There has been two main studies into obedience the first of these in 1963 by Milgram who advertised in the local paper for men of various ages and from all walks of life. He told the volunteers that they would take part in a test of memory and learning and would get paid $4.50 for the hour they were in the experiment. When they arrived at Yale University they were introduced to two people one of which was ‘Jack Williams’ who was wearing a grey laboratory coat and was to be the experimenter, the other person was a mild man in his fifties called Mr Wallace who was meant to be another volunteer but in fact were both actors. Then the volunteer was lead into a room where

People don't always conform for the same reason's, in 1958 Kelman identified three main forms of conformity, each of which could produce conforming behaviour but in different ways. The first of these and the most superficial is Compliance: Going along with the majority in order to avoid rejection or in order to gain rewards such as social acceptance or approval. The distinguishing feature of compliance

Nonconformity for me means not accomplishing something that you were told to do and refusing to do it. This is important to me because it shows me how people can never accomplish things because they will refuse to do so or might not even respond to obeying the ideas given. Self-reliance means relying on yourself for everything and not having other people to help help you with something you can do on our own or they do not want to know. It is important to me because I have to rely on myself since I was young so I do not worry so much about relying on someone.

Venerated poet, Maya Angelou, once wrote, “few survive, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of… conformity.” This is especially true in the education system, where impressionable youth submit to a doctrine of doing simply what they are told, doing as others do. Nearly all schools rain down this ruling, as in many cases it is necessary to their functionality, so as to avoid a becoming a system that runs on a mild form of anarchy. However, in many cases, the conformist rule is unnecessarily strong, and grossly impeding on personal freedoms, as I’ve seen myself within our own school.

Everyone has the disease. Everyone is infected. No one can help you. Conformity. It’s in your blood. Conformity means you change yourself to please another, change the way you speak because everyone else is doing it--- even questioning yourself about what to do next since you feel the need to have people’s opinions. Unfortunately, there is no way to escape from this disease. Everyone should get out of their shell every once in awhile, but that still won’t help you.

In society, when it comes to understanding what a deviant act is, we must be able to understand how conformity plays a big part. A person cannot simply understand what is deviant without understand conformity, it’s almost like society and culture; both intertwine and cannot be understood without one another. The need to belong is a basic human motive and even if they may not agree with everything in society, humans conform because they fear of being disbanded or sanctioned from the group. Norms also play a big part in deviance, norms are the rules on how a person should behave, but when someone breaks those rules, then it is deviant. Now, norms vary in different places. In many countries, the death penalty is extremely deviant, but is accepted in America. Also, because society can change overtime, so do norms. In the 1600 century and for a long time, slavery was justified as okay because people were making profit. Today, murder, adultery, gambling, drugs, cheating on tests, and skipping class are all considered deviant acts. If an individual violates a norm, it is expected to receive responses from others; negative sanctions. The intensity of the negative sanction depends on the importance of the norm. There’s two types of sanctions; informal and formal. Informal sanctions come from social groups and can vary from dirty stares from friends and family to disapproval by the group. A formal sanction comes organizations within society and can vary from fines to prison. So,

Conformity can be defined as an individual changing their own perspective or opinion in order to comply with a standared or norm.Most of the time it is caused by social influence that comes from a group of people. When a given person is a part of a group, their thoughts on a certain subject may be influenced to the point of change. This act og gooing along with a norm is demonstarted in a number of experiments. One of the most popular one is the Asch Experiment conducted by Solomon Asch in 1951, this experiment was also the first to solely evaluate conformity. Asch brought together up to eight students per group to be subjects. In everyIn every group he had, there would really only be one real research subject, all of the others were already

Obedience is defined as compliance with an order, request, or submission to another’s authority. Just about everyone obeys someone or something on a daily basis without even thinking about it. It is normal and useful for keeping law and order in a common civilized society. Obedience is not a bad thing, it is just a way of controlling people. However, the opposite end of obedience is disobedience which is usually viewed as bad, especially in the context of a societal view. Both obedience and disobedience serve a purpose, from positive control through obedience, to denying control to avoid being influenced to do something immoral. Erich Fromm, Doris Lessing, and Stanley Milgram reveal how the effects of obedience can be negative and how hard it can be to disobey. Obedience can be catastrophic; during the holocaust, many men obeyed orders only to find they were puppets in an evil scheme. However, thriving obedience in the human species is a cause of the need to please, a difficulty to disobey, and social pressures that are displayed among groups.

Both of these studies lack population validity. Sherif study was conducted on American University boys so it isn’t representative of everybody. Alike Sherif’s study, Ash’s study conducted on all males. So both studies are androcentric. This means that the results of both experiments are only representative for males and don’t apply to women so it isn’t representative of the target population.

To answer the question what is CONFORMITY we ca use the description of psychologists who described it as: "The most general concept and refers to any change in behaviour caused by another person or group; the individual acted in some way because of influence from others." (Breckler, 2006)