Conformity has a lot to do with the aspect of changing one’s belief or ideas to fit into another group. Most of what is today’s society plays a major role in this. Everyday you see different types of groups and the way they dress or act. There are so many different ways everyone conforms daily. In our generation the one major conformity or habit to say the majority of society follows is education, going to school to graduate and get a degree. This is a social norm that society follows from either parents or siblings. Your family tries to get you to the understanding that in order to get the job you want you must take the steps to do so. It is then set forth for you to either go the right path or your own way.The type of conformity that could be present is compliance which reinstates that the individual takes the advice and then shows it off to get a reaction from another.For instance your parents highly recommend you going to college to get a masters degree and then going further in life. The individual would take this advice and then try to prove to his parents that they did it and get a certain reaction by the other. Conformity has many effects and continues to play major roles in our generation, however society is getting extremely advanced due to the way technology impacted the minds.Peer pressure is a form of social influence that makes you change.The way people make sense of their surroundings is through impressions, interpretation, or the behavior of others and how it affects attitudes stereotypes and other people.The overarching idea is that conformity,persuasion,stereotypes,and culture all affect and show how society maintains and changes social norms.
Conformity is the matching of one’s attitude, opinion or behavior to those of other people.Solomon Asch a sociologist who conducted an experiment to investigate the extent in which social pressure from a group could possibly affect a person to conform.The experiments consisted of 50 male students that participated in a ‘vision test.’Eight subjects were seated around a table and Asch viewed and recorded the amount of times each participant conformed to the majority of the view.The background of this experiment was that only one participant was a genuine subject for the experiment the rest were set to say a certain statement. “There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.
Asch’s experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a ‘real participant.’ This form of testing allowed Asch to view and determine the effect that peer pressure had on the contestant choosing the answer that everyone else chose rather than the correct one.To the viewpoint of Asch it had surprised him that out of the 50 times the experiment was performed 37 of the participants conformed to the wrong answers given by the other group members at least once.The conclusion Asch came to was that “When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought ‘peculiar.A few of them said that they really did believe the group’s answers were correct.” People tend to conform through peer pressure because they want to be able to fit in with the group and also due to the reason of believing the group is better informed than they are. The two forms that influence this belief is normative influence and informational influence, both going hand in hand with the thought of peer pressure leading the contestant to perform certain techniques that make them end up with the answer they choose.Informational conformity occurs when a person takes the viewpoints of others and interprets them possessing more information about the situation. An example of this is when learning how to drive you have a parent or instructor teaching you, however we seek out information from them for guidance as the conclusion is made that these people know more about the laws of driving than the learners know.Normative conformity on the other hand refers to the act of conforming to the expectations of others in order to be accepted by them.This is seen a lot in our society because in high school especially as teenagers they tend to conform to popular fashion that everyone else is participating in so they could fit in with other groups and avoid being isolated and being seen in a manner of disapproval.This occurrence proves individuals have and will continue to become dependent on others for social approval.
Persuasion can also be seen in society through minority influence. Minority influence is when an individual or group influences the majority. An example of this can be seen as how a small percentage of society controles a large amount of the country’s wealth. Society members’ influence over others could possibly be through media, religion, politics.The media has a major impact on public opinion due to the sole reason its information from figures that we choose to believe and follow. A negative point is that the media can distort information so we aren’t able to get all of the correct information or intent trying to be formed could be possibly misunderstood. The perfect example of this is in today’s society everyone goes on the news and sometimes there’s unreliable sources that give out false information and we believe it because there’s no other source to prove it. “Even many traditional news organizations and media outlets report incomplete aspects of scientific studies, or misinterpret the findings and highlight unusual claims. Once these items enter into the social media echo chamber, they’re amplified. The facts become lost in the shuffle of competing information, limited attention or both.”The main reasons that people change their opinions the majority of the time is that they want to change social norms. This idea is used to explain why there are laws put in place forcing conformity and obedience in society. There were experiments performed that supported the need for authority and compliance. The goal was to understand developments of norms and effects social expectations in a simulated vs. civilian environment. The purpose of doing this is to change and be able to adapt to the new norms instead of maintaining the old ones. In Societies such as the United States the social controls are expressed in places such as collectivist cultures that are places in which social expectations are based and depended on the majority influence and it can eventually change and change happens overtime which is based on what the majority says and does not approve of.
Social influence is another form of social control which is the power people have to change attitudes,opinions, and behaviors. This influence can take forms meaning persuasion and minority influence.Persuasion is the way of attempting to change one’s viewpoint to another based on their reasoning.This technique is used to gain compliance from others and get them to behave in a specific way. Another example would be a door in the face. The persuader attempts to convince the responder to comply by making a request that the respondent will turn down then ask for something smaller and they know it will be granted. Done by molding or training the mind to perform specific responses these theories form the desired response from an individual.
