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Peer pressure as a social issue
Peer pressure as a social issue
Significance of conformity in social psychology
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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). Most often, especially with women, we see peer pressure, daily at the grocery store magazine stands, on television in commercials riddled with photo shopped expectations of beauty, and even in books with elaborative, yet unreal descriptions of women. The peer pressure
Peer pressure plays a huge role in today's society. About ninety percent of teens have been influenced by peer pressure in their lives. The narrator in the short story, The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant, was greatly influenced by Sheila Mant. She caused him to change his personality for her. It didn’t work. Sheila wasn’t interested in him even after he worked so hard to impress her. The narrator instantly regretted the situations in which he changed his personality. He regretted those instances throughout his entire life. It is important that a person does not change themselves for their peers because they will most likely regret it at some point in their
The most basic concept in social psychology is conformity. Conformity is the idea that behaviour or a belief is changed in order to follow, or conform, to what is considered the “norm.” One of the oldest experiments to support this notion was conducted in 1935 by Muzafer Sherif (Song, Ma, Wu, Li, 2012 p. 1366). There are two different types of
Yakusheva, O., Kapinos, K., & Weiss, M. (2011). Peer effects and the freshman 15: Evidence from a natural experiment. Economics & Human Biology, 9(2), 119-132.
Robbins finds this behavior to be undesirable, saying that it is not only unappealing, but it is a cop-out. In agreement with Robbins, parents across the world, organizations, and teen movies tell society that conformity is bad and that children should not conform to the group, rather they should stand alone and be individuals. However, Solomon Asch’s study may have discovered why this is. He concluded that: “The investigations described in this series are concerned with the independence and lack of independence in the face of group pressure” (1). Asch determines that in the face of pressure, people are more apt to conform.
Solomon Asch developed and ran an experiment regarding the power of conformity that affects most populations. Psychologists have been attempting to fully understand the mental workings behind why people are so easily pressured into following others for the longest time. The main focus of psychologists, is to figure and understand what the causes are behind social conformity. Numerous terms are brought up when studying conformity. The “unspoken rules or guidelines for behavior in a group” (Hock 293) are labeled as social norms. When individuals are placed in large groups, the tendency is to lean with whatever the majority of the group thinks. The regular behavior of the individual tends to readjust to appease the superior crowd.
In 1951, Solomon Asch carried out several experiments on conformity. The aim of these studies was to investigate conformity in a group environment situation. The purpose of these experiments was to see if an individual would be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. Asch believed that conformity reflects on relatively rational process in which people are pressured to change their behaviour. Asch designed experiments to measure the pressure of a group situation upon an individual judgment. Asch wanted to prove that conformity can really play a big role in disbelieving our own senses.
Why do we feel the need to be accepted by certain groups even if that means that we have to do or wear stuff we wouldn’t normally like? How far are we willing to go to try to mold ourselves to those standards? Sociologist today call this behavior conformity. Conformity is defined as “action in accord with prevailing social standards, attitudes and practices, (conformity)”. People tend to conform to group standards so they can feel like they are accepted and have a stable spot in society. Although some examples of this are fairly innocent, dressing in “trendy” clothes or behaving how your friends are acting so as not to be perceived as strange, conformity can easily turn into a dangerous situation. For example, say everyone in your primary group
Solomon Asch’s experiment in “Opinions and Social Pressure” studied a subject’s ability to yield to social pressure when placed within a group of strangers. His research helped illustrate how groups encourage conformity. During a typical experiment, members of the group were asked by the experimenter to claim two obvious mismatched lines were identical. The single individual who was not privy to this information was the focal point of the experiment. Twelve out of eighteen times the unsuspecting individual went along with the majority, dispelling his beliefs in favor of the opinions of the group.
In 1951, Solomon Asch set out to update an experiment previously performed by Muzafer Sherif in 1935. Sherif’s experiment attempted to explore peer pressure to conform by seeing if groups of subjects would give the same incorrect answers as the carefully instructed confederates in their group. Asch felt that because there had been no correct answer to Sherif’s experiment, it could not be considered legitimate since there could be no gauge as to what the right or wrong answer was. In his updating of this experiment, he created what is now considered “a classic experiment in Social Psychology” (simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity, 2008) and “the procedure became the standard for hundreds of later experiments” (Social Psychology David G. Myers,
Conformity is abundant in a group of adolescent peer groups. Adolescent peer groups often are filled with peer pressure and the need to “be like everyone else” (Simons-Morton, Bruce, and Tilda Farhat.). This peer pressure can cause these adolescents to change who they are and how they act around others. Many adolescents conform to make sure they don’t stand out or go against popular opinion. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards and the inmates conformed to their roles and if they did not they would look out of place and be punished ("THE STORY: AN OVERVIEW OF THE EXPERIMENT."). The inmates that did not conform to the guard’s rules were often beaten and abused. The inmates that did conform to the guard’s rules wouldn’t receive punishments
Another example, which portrays peer influence, involves parties over the weekend. Multiple students stated they were falling behind in classes on the grounds that their friends wanted to go out the night before and they did not want to seem/appear “lame” so they tagged along. The influence of a group is intensified by the person’s desire to be an accepted member of the peer group. To achieve this desire he tries to conform in everyday to the patterns approved by the group (Aronson et al.... ... middle of paper ... ...
The study that I will be reviewing for this assignment is the Asch Conformity Experiment. This particular experiment struck my interest a lot more than the other options presented to us and I definitely wanted to look more into it. According to psychological terms, conformity refers to an individual's tendency to follow the unspoken rules or actions of the shared group to which one may belong(McLeod, 2007). Scientists for a very long time have been concerned with to what degree people follow or rebel against social norms. Solomon Asch took it upon himself to conduct an experiment to examine the extent to which social pressure from a mass group could affect an individual to conform.
Magnusson (1988) and Brofenbrenner (1979) state that social environment in which a person is embedded is essential in the study of their behavior. The theoretical framework of developmental and life course theories of crime allow for the addition of the dynamic element of time and places an emphasis on the longitudinal processes of how the interaction between the individual and his or her social environments constrain and influence behavior.
Peer pressure is when we are influenced to do something we normally wouldn't do because we want to fit in with other people or be accepted by our peers (A peer is someone you look up to like a friend, someone in the community or even someone on TV).
Children grow up and move into teenage lifestyles, involvement with their peers, and how they look in other peoples eyes start to matter. Their hormones kick in, and they experience rapid changes in their minds, and bodies. They also develop a mind of their own, questioning the adult standards and need for their parental guidance. By trying new values and testing ideas with peers there is less of a chance of being criticized. Even though peer pressure can have positive effects, the most part is the bad part.