Social Conformity Research Paper

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The process of changing behavior to match their peers is called social conformity (Yu 1). Conformity in a social environment is natural and necessary for our continued survival. We see a pattern in the Asch experiments, notice the different types of conformity, realize why we conform, discover what happens when conformity is not necessary, and acknowledge the benefits in conformity. We all conform in one way or another, but why do we do it if everyone tells us not to?
Solomon Asch was known as a forerunning in early psychology. The experiment in question, the Conformity experiment tested conformity in a simple task using the demonstration of groupthink. A number of people were given a set of lines as a group and were asked to respond with …show more content…

As some would define creativity, creativity needs an independent mind and the mindset of diverging from a majority norms because a new idea may not be tolerated or accepted by the group (Goncalo 5). So, in this example, creativity relies on a person not tied down to the idea of rejection from a group. Why think bold, new ideas if no one is going to listen? So why do companies form groups dedicated to coming up with new ideas or schools put students into groups for big projects? As Goncalo says in his article, Follow the Crowd in a New Direction: When Conformity Pressure Facilitates Group Creativity (And When It Does Not), “. . . it is possible that conformity pressure within individualistic groups might not stifle the behaviors that are necessary for such groups to be creative but make them more likely to emerge with regularity” (9). Basically saying that in a group of people who act in an independent way, creativity isn’t inhibited, but bolstered because the individuals don’t care about the outcome of inventing new ideas. The pressure to conform does not stifle the flow like it would in a group of people who are more likely to go with another’s ideas. This is an example of when individualism is beneficial, but, even then, the individual was still in a group. This continues with our idea of necessity of group

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