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Merit of peer pressure
The effect of peer pressure
Importance and effects of friendship
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As mammals, humans share the same traits as wolves. We feel the need to form packs as an inherent part of life. I think this feeling derives from years of solitary confinement and the lack of individuals to comfort you through your times of need. This could both be beneficial and a hindrance. If you are not accepted into a group, your self-esteem plummets beyond despair and you begin to deem yourself unworthy. Social status in this world means everything. It is the so called ‘friends’ who aid in this bittersweet process. They encourage that which should not be encouraged. They promote distasteful ideas because in turn, it was the same way for them. The only way to influence is to be influenced. Instead of cultivating your own idea, you take on the opinions of others and you make this your belief. Furthermore, when something contradicts with this belief, you make it your mission to mindlessly defend it while regurgitating what you’ve been told. It’s human nature. Then again, influence is not all that bad. At times it could prove inspirational. What is born from inspiration but ideas and change? You also have to take into account that most people struggle with change because it conflicts with their cognitive way of thinking. It is an idea which they are not used to when they’d rather settle for what they know. To find people with similar thinking, they turn towards the unreliable term, “friends.”
Unlike wolves, we don’t create groups in order to hunt. We can find all of our chemically induced processed foods at our local supermarkets, but instead we create groups for a less fundamental reason; that is to fit in and to be accepted. But fit in with the wrong group, and it’s a life-long onslaught of regret. This is when the quote...
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... are. If it doesn’t threaten your life, it really isn’t important. These people aren’t special, they’re just more self-aware. They care less. Ignorance can be a good thing. The less you know, the less you have to worry. Once you have a taste of friendship, it’s addicting. It’s as if it has its own mixture of nicotine. This is the reason why there are so many groups. To be a loner, you have to start a loner. This takes commitment. Your school life will become miserable and days will seem longer. This is all for the sake of escaping the falsehood that hides beneath the term friendship. If you’re kind to me, you’re kind to others. If the truth is cruelty, then kindness must be a lie. Not all lies are bad, and the truth is not always cruel. But, the majority dominates the minority. This is a fact of life. A fact that shares the bond between friendship and rivalry.
Being a bad influence is a lot like being a daisy in a sunflower field. In order to get what they want, they both spread everywhere. Spreading the bad idea and seed throughout. Throughout time peers and ourselves have influenced us to want money or just to seem cool.
They are taught that the individual is nothing, mankind is everything, and that everyone must be treated with absolute equality. To choose a friend is to single out, and elevate, one man from the group. Also, choosing a friend requires individual thought, personal choices, and value judgments, all of which are forbidden. They are expected to be mindless, and thus selfless. This should not be condemned because making friends is a natural human thing. To go through life without actually knowing other people gives you a one-sided and skewed view of the world.
Many people have trouble being apart of a society. These troubles come from trying to fit in, which is also known as conforming. Another trouble is trying to express one’s own style with one’s own opinion. This is a trouble due to the fact that many people have the fear of being frowned upon when being the black sheep of the group if one’s opinion does not correspond with other opinions. This is where one’s own sense of who they are, individuality, and trying to fit in, conformity, can get confused. A nickname for conformity is “herd behavior” which is the name of an article where the author relates animals that herd with people that conform. Many people have a different philosophy of this topic which will be expressed in this essay. An important
In comparing man as the lone hunter to the cooperative being he is today, it is evident that his species has thrived and survived with much greater ease in a cooperative society as opposed to a lone hunter. Though it can be easily argued that this cooperation between man, is at some level a sort of mutual altruism, it may better be understood as a selfish means of survival. The saying goes that "there is safety in numbers," "this could not be more true for man's plight." Because alone man stands little chance of perpetuating his genes, he flocks to the community where he has the better chance of survival, as do his genes. So to better understand the reasoning behind man's need to be in the community, it is imperative to look at nature.
...ip and they lack what it takes for a real friendship to flourish. Aristotle talks about how “cities are built around friendships” and believe this to be so true because friendships can mature into such greater things. A friendship consists of so many things within it, a true virtuous relationship relies on communication, trust, loyalty, and many other things. These qualities that make up a good friendship are nonexistent in a Utility or Pleasure relationship.
“Social conformity has been practiced in societies around the world since ancient times,” and the reason it is so effective is that humans have an inherent need to be accepted as part of a group (Sadat). Furthermore, Hossna Sadat reports that:
Doris Lessing uses this to state that individuals will conform to the majority because of society’s pressures and lose individualism. Lessing uses the fact that because of western societies are well educated in different ways, free to make choices that this makes the individual, but people never think to look at their lives and see that they are no longer and individual because they are conforming to the pressures of society. She uses the fact that people often socialize with “like-minded” people often forces to make decisions that our peers make. She declares that, “We find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group.” She goes on to review several experiments that involved conforming to groups.
Conformity and Obedience in Society The desire to be accepted and belong to a group is an undeniable human need. But how does this need affect an individual? Social psychologists have conducted numerous experiments and concluded that, through various forms of social influence, groups can change their members’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In her essay “Group Minds,” Doris Lessing discusses our paradoxical ability to call ourselves individuals and our inability to realize that groups define and influence us.
Elliot Aronson (2012) provides a definition of conformity, two social psychological processes that underlie a conformity and cited examples of reasons why people conform in the book, The Social Animal. Aronson (2012) defines a conformity as “a change in a person’s behavior or opinion as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people” (p.19). In accordance with Aronson’s (2012) definition of conformity, people do conform owing to the social influence, which are two main social psychological processes: belonging and getting information.
Conformity, or going along with the crowd, is a unique phenomenon that manifests itself in our thoughts and behaviors. It’s quite simple to identify countless examples of the power of conformity in virtually all aspects of social life. Conformity influences our opinions and relationships with others, often to a higher extent than we realize. It is posited that people generally conform to the group in order to fit in and avoid rejection or because they truly believe the group is more knowledgeable than they are. After analyzing numerous studies and experiments on the nature of conformity, one will find that the motive of social acceptance is the greatest driver of conformity.
“Conformity is a form of social influence that involves a change in behavior or belief so that one can fit in with a certain group” (McLeod). Such a change is a response to imagined (which involves the pressure of expectations or social norms) or real (which involves the presence of others) group pressure. Another definition of conformity can be “yielding to group pressures”. Group pressure can take many forms, for example persuasion, teasing, bullying, criticism etc. Conformity is also referred to as group pressure or majority influence. The term conformity is mostly used to show an agreement to the position of the majority, and this is brought about by either by the desire to be liked or to fit in, or just to match a social role. The aim of this paper is to argue that conformity is among people because they always live in groups-work groups, family, political, religious and social groups. At the same instance, they are adjusted to obey authority. A conformist mentality makes it easy for people to be influenced by others.
Conformity is defined as behavior in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards. This is not a good or bad thing, this just is. It exists as a compliment to earlier humans congregating into larger groups, using agriculture and domestication to create sustenance. Also, conformity is essential for life. We need people to share the same ideas, ideologies and a way of thinking in order to work efficiently and effectively. There many examples that exist like, at work or in your house and even within yourself. Sigmund Freud has explained the phenomena of group psychology in a piece titled, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Using Freud’s theory of conformity I will explain the self, what we call “me”,and its different constituents using The Principles of Psychology by
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 is harmful for the society and its democratic norms....
To what extent do those around us affect the way we think; they we perceive a situation; or they way we form our prerogatives? There are many different trains of thought, some of which are adopted, others of which are taken into account based on experience and periods of introspection, but there is one that lies with it, a fundamental difference in comparison to others: the group mind. To which it involves several individuals, a group mind is in essence, a collective following to a set of beliefs and/or practices, usually brought together through forms of social pressure and preconceived notions of moral obligation. Furthermore, these groups are often characterized by the absence of individualism and a sense of obliviousness towards how their unspoken rules influences their view of the world as a whole. Moreover, group minds also involve social pressures, often enticing some to forsake their opinions to fit the given status quo of the group. Indeed, humans are social creatures that want to feel as if their participation in a group has value, but without the awareness of how social pressures affect their ability to make decisions and how one can overcome such pressure, they are nothing more but mental toxins, or in other words, group minds.
Developing a group’s identity can be difficult as an identity is a multi-faceted project due to the clashing of multiple egos and personalities. The crucial points of development are: which team building perspective to work from, how to prevent role conflict and encourage role acceptance, and encourage personal and interpersonal cohesion which leads to group cohesion.