Is there a situation in your life where you have to go with a group pressure. Let me give you an example of peer pressure. One day a person was invented on his friend’s birthday party. He has never drunk before because of his friends pressure he had to drunk. In the article, “Group Pressure”, Rodney Stark focuses on group pressure. More Specifically, he proved his idea that higher number of people will go with the group pressure by giving the examples from the Asch experiments. After reading the article, I was surprised that large numbers of people will go with the group while only small number of people will stay with their decision. I was surprised that higher number of people went with a group even though they knew that the
A strong teamwork is built when the team members ameliorate each other’s weaknesses with their strengths. In Rodman Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty, Maxwell Kane and Kevin Avery work together as a team, mitigating one another’s shortcomings and making friends in the process. Max and Kevin’s symbiotic relationship helps the boys socially, brings their good out into the world, and morphs them into a bionic body that makes up for the other’s flaws.
A real life example of pressure could be the current presidential election, as both candidates are feeling forced to either make statements they think are not true or are belittling the other candidate in order to make themselves look better. In Macbeth, the differences in political beliefs made Lady Macbeth pressure Macbeth into murdering the king in order to take over and rule for himself. Lady Macbeth persuades Macbeth to murder Duncan by saying “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking - place and we’ll not fail” (1.7.69-71). In the end, it was the cause of Macbeth’s death as he was not able to hide the fact that he
So far, conformity has been discussed in terms of group identification and social roles. However, individuals also tend to change prior beliefs to seek group acceptance. Asch (1951) investigated the effect of group pressure on conformity by asking participants to make a line judgment with seven confederates that gave the same obviously incorrect answer. Yet, 37% of participants conformed by giving the incorrect majority answer, whereas in the absence of group pressure, less than 1% of participants conformed (Asch, 1951). There are implications on normative influence as individuals, despite knowing the majority opinion was incorrect, may conform to avoid social punishment (Breckler et al., 2005). However, Turner and colleagues (1987) argued
Due to the nature of our own biology we are social animals who continuously desire companionship, seek approval from others, and aspire to fit in. However this conformity prohibits individuals from expressing their true thoughts and instead actively engages them into peer pressured situations, subconsciously following social norms. Hence, the individual succumbs to groupthink. Groupthink occurs when groups are highly cohesive and are aware they must make a quality decision under considerable pressure. It is a process of rationalization that sets in when group members start thinking alike (Sims & Sauser, 2013). Eight symptoms of groupthink exist – illusion of invulnerability (group thinks they are invincible), collective rationalization (no reconsiderations to assumptions), belief in inherent morality (ignore ethical or consequences of their decisions), stereotyped views of out-groups (“enemy” is too evil, weak, or stupid to bother with), self-censorship (doubts from group consensus are not expressed), illusion of unanimity (everyone agrees with everyone else), and self-appointed mindguards (members protect group from information that is contradictory or problematic to group’s cohesiveness) (Janis, 1972). If a group of individuals came together they would engage in these symptoms of groupthink, resulting in a “bad” decision-making process producing less than optimal outcomes.
Firstly, one may think the size of a group is a factor and more people
Solomon E. Asch was a pioneer in research social psychology in the 1950’s. His experiments were on conformity, or how probable would it be that an individual would give into peer pressure. All individuals will experience some sort of peer influence in their life time, the effect could be good or bad. “At the same time, peer groups create strong expectations for appearance and behavior that can taint the positive rewards associated with peer interaction” (Chirban, Ph.D., Th.D, 2014).
When Timothy Piazza needed help, his fellow fraternity brothers decided to not risk getting in trouble or disrupting the harmony of the group. Concurrence pressures have come up in studies showing that it helps reinforce and strengthen an individual’s acceptance of the group's decision. Concurrence seeking correlates with concurrence pressures and cohesiveness. Concurrence seeking is a contributing component to cohesiveness because both initiate conformity. It has been found that cohesiveness has an impact on the quality of decision making of a group when the group size is large. Identity theory and social identity theory combined cognitive processes self-verification and depersonalization occur within the individual trying to go along with group norms. Understanding why groupthink may occur and what is the social processes that occur around is needed to know to further study why groupthink goes bad in a group. Groupthink can have a good or bad effect on group depending on the group's decision-making
Here we can look at Solomon Asch Conformity Experiment. Solomon Asch (1951) conducted an experiment to investigate the extent in which social pressure from a group could affect a person to conform. So basically, Asch grouped persons in a room; each participant was asked to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was obvious. There were a couple of people apart of the group that were in on the experiment and were told to give a misleading answer and then only one participates that was not aware of the experiment. Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. About one third of the participants went along and conformed to the clearly incorrect majority view. As later questioned why participants conform so readily? 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 thought as strange for seeing something
One of the not so obvious examples is a scene where John starts whistling a tune, and Brian joins in. Before long they are all whistling the song; whether or not they realize it they are following the group norm. More obvious examples are when Mr. Vernon leaves his office, John decides to make a trip to his locker. Again, the rest of the group follow him, despite the risk of getting caught. As well as, during the scene where they are smoking marijuana initially Andrew, Brian and Allison attempt to hold out and not smoke; but one by one they join Claire and John. Just as in our book says, in some groups, the need for conformity and consensus is so high that diverging ideas and differing opinions are strongly discouraged and excluded in the group’s decision-making process; this was dubbed Groupthink by social psychologist Irving Janis (1972). Chapter 13: Social Psychology. (n.d.). In Introduction to Psychology: A Top Hat Interactive Text (p. 13.3.1.1). I think that high school is the hardest time to not succumb to groupthink, to not conform to what others in your peer group are
Since the experiment was required to done in the classroom, we have limited access to recruit people from other majors of the students in the university. In this case, our participants can only be the students who are in the Psyc217 class. This may lower the validity of the experiment because all of our participants were psychology students. A big concern is that the participants might have already learned about the conformity effect so they wouldn’t choose to conform. In addition, due to the limit circumstance, our sample size was small. Thus, the result might not be accurate enough to provide evidence to show nonconformity. Moreover, during the experiment, we were unable to create a true environment which using the presence of people to form group pressure. The reason is that we cannot have the same experimenters during the experiment due to the course requirement. Using presence of people (the experimenters) to create group pressure may lower the validity of the experiment since one experimenter may be more persuasive and assertive than the others. Therefore, we used sentences to represent group pressure. However, it is considered to have some problems that may threaten
Participants were not under any explicit demand to conform, as they received no physical or verbal coercion to do so. The specific hypothesis centered on the idea, “if group pressure can play influence and effect individuals perception, decision and attitudes”. The independent variable will be “Procedure”, and the dependent variable is the “level of conformity did change”.
The first type of social influence is conformity. Conformity is defined as yielding to group pressures (Crutchfield, 1955). The examples for group pressure are bullying, teasing, and criticism. According to Man (1969), there are three types of conformity such as normative, informational and ingratiational. However, Kelman (1958) dignified the differences between the three different types of conformity through the course of compliance, internalization and identification. The normative conformity states that the yielding to group pressure occurs in accordance where a person wants to adjust themselves in the group by accepting the point of views given by the group while privately disagreeing their perception which is known as compliance. This
Estrada E. & Vargas-Estrada E. (2013). How Peer Pressure Shapes Consensus, Leadership, and Innovations in Social Groups. Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/srep02905
Groupthink is a term used to refer to a theory introduced by a social psychologist Mr. Irving L. Janis in 1972 through observations of small groups performing problem solving tasks. His theory refers to systematic errors and ineffective decisions being made due to group collective decision making. Groupthink arises due to conformity such as group pressure taking place where a stronger body of the group or the leader pressurises on making the decision they may prefer. Group pressures result in a fall of “mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgement” (Janis, 1982: p.9). This therefore eliminates new opportunities a group could benefit from such as bringing new ideas, knowledge, creativity and expertise in order to get a solution to
This group was formed to achieve specific goals for a bigger task. Our group has members with diverse backgrounds which allows a wide variety of ideas to be stimulated during discussion. Going in with an open mind I understood anything could happen, but our group meshed amazingly. Everyone has participated evenly and helped out when needed. After talking about personal strengths and weaknesses each member then better understood each other. Jordan, Kieante, Madison and I all preferred to do work at the last minute because we work more efficiently. While Tyler, Sarina and Yahaira like to worked early and ahead. As a group we decided to get everything done early. Knowing all the members strengths and weaknesses, they have not changed any of my decisions, but may as we get later in the 5k preparation process.