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Strength and weakness of social comparison theory
Strength and weakness of social comparison theory
Strengths and weaknesses of social comparison theory
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The social comparison theory has been studied for years and defined as the philosophy that people need to turn to others for assurance of their own opinions and actions. In other words, people base their personal worth on how they compare to peers around them. This theory can support why it is human nature to be envious of others based on what they have. Individuals need to evaluate themselves in almost every aspect of life, including wealth, relationship status, and intelligence. These are some areas where most people their evaluations to determine how successful their life is at the current moment. In “A Theory of Social Processes” by Leon Festinger, he collects data based on this theory and presents certain hypotheses that can be supported through different experiments. Not only has it been shown in experiments, but also in everyday life. In a televised series, “That’s 70s Show” the main character, Eric Forman, has gone through a situation where he displayed the social comparison theory. Lastly, in personal experiences I have a friend that has encountered a cheating problem in his relationship that caused him to rethink about what he will do based on the consensus of his peers. Festinger’s first hypothesis states how people are driven to evaluate their own opinions and abilities because people want to be socially …show more content…
In the experiment, the group of individuals that were heavily influenced that their judgement was poor had no choice but to join the group’s decision despite having opposing views. Similarly, Eric Forman had to stop attending his disco roller-skating events because his friend group was totally against it. Lastly, Varun ended up telling his girlfriend he cheated because his respect from the group was on the line. All in all, this theory that people have to listen to other individual’s opinions to grade their worth has become obvious through these
Asch and Milgram’s experiment was unethical in their methods of not informing the participant of the details surrounding the experiment and the unwarranted stress; their experiment portrayed the circumstances of real life situation surrounding the issues of obedience to authority and social influence. In life, we are not given the courtesy of knowledge when we are being manipulated or influenced to act or think a certain way, let us be honest here because if we did know people were watching and judging us most of us would do exactly as society sees moral, while that may sound good in ensuring that we always do the right thing that would not be true to the ways of our reality. Therefore, by not telling the participants the details of the experiment and inflicting unwarranted stress, Asch and Milgram’s replicated the reality of life. In “Options and Social Pressure” Solomon E. Asch conducts an experiment to show the power of social influence, by using the lengths of sticks that the participants had to match up with the best fit, Asch then developed different scenarios to see how great the power of influence is, but what he discovered is that people always conformed to the majority regardless of how big or small the error was the individual always gave in to the power of the majority.
It often leads to people adjusting responses to stimuli just because they believe that if everyone else has the same response they must have it too. This is shown in "Asch Experiment" after McLeod explained how the dot of light never moved, he mentioned, "The participants are then asked to estimate how far the dot of light moves. These estimates are made out loud, and with repeated trials, each group of three converges on an estimate. The main finding of the study was that groups found their own "social norm" of perception." (McLeod 2) This shows that when placed in an environment where some people have a different opinion than others, the popular opinion takes over and everyone's opinion becomes uniform because people doubt themselves when they are alone on an opinion, leading to conformity. People in environments like this should try to keep their own opinions as to prevent the spread of conformity when uniqueness is
...res; it is how we are raised to obey authority such as parents or teachers. Some have argued that individuals today are more aware of the dangers of following authority than they were in the early 1960s. This experiment is biased because the participants are all male and all were volunteers. Milgram points out that the majority of the subjects knew what they were doing was not right or moral. Opting out of the experiment would be wrong on the victim’s part because they agreed to go through even after they knew they were going to be the victim. Overall, disobedience was hard to do in an experiment such as this once. Participants felt as though they had a duty to fulfill this study and that they had to go through with it. Participants put their morals aside for this experiment which is why the outcome of victims that made it to the final series of shocks was so high.
All of our interactions within this world hold a certain degree of influence that we do not often think twice about. In certain occupations this influence and power can be seen and understood. A college professor, for example, may or may not be aware of his or her influence on a student’s opinion. Professors are in a position in which they can persuade or influence a person’s opinion. Because students often find trust in what their professor is saying, it is easy to succumb to their views, beliefs, or opinions. Not all students can be persuaded so easily, however over a decade of a teaching a professor has likely influenced thousands of studen...
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.
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.
The Psychology of Social Status. Scientific America. 8 Dec. 2009: 1 p.m. Web. The Web. The Web.
The astute reader may notice that this review does not include any papers that did not find a false consensus effect. The reason for this is not that this paper is not representative of the literature, but rather, that it is. The uniformity of the literature suggests that the phenomenon is fairly common. Some interesting arguments as to why this is are motivational or cognitive in nature. The motivational premise is based in the idea that people are motivated to believe that they have a place in their social environment. This argument is a based in self-justification, in that if many people share a given belief or behavior, it makes it easier to justify that this attitude or behavior is either right, or not as bad as it might seem.
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 order to understand why people conform so easily, one must analyze the effects of belongingness on our thought and behavior. This inescapable fear of rejection leads people to make cognitive and behavioral alterations in order to fit in and feel good about themselves. In the Milgram study, this fear of rejection (i.e. not being accepted by the man wearing a lab coat) caused participants to go against their own values and inflict pain on someone else. The confederate in the lab coat was able to capitalize on the participant’s fear through a few brief statements like, “The experiment will be ruined if you stop” or, “I need you to keep going.” After hearing these words, participants would often jump right back into shocking the man in order to please, and to be accepted by, the doctor running the experiment. In general, the psychological importance of self-esteem can help explain why people conform so easily: people want to feel good about themselves, which is achieved through acceptance and belongingness (Sociometer Theory), so people will usually go out of their way to feel accepted and thus feel good about
By comparing ourselves with other people we categorize and label those who are similar to us as the in-group and people who differ from our-self are categorized as the out-group (Duff & Peace, 2012). We act in ways to favor our in-group rather than out group, this is called in-group favoritism. In-groups and out-groups are evident in many social environments, for example, children form groups with those who like playing similar games to them. In a study that explains in-group favoritism, an experiment was conducted by allocating individuals into groups based on the result of a coin flip (Billing & Tajfel, 1973). After having been told their group members, the participants then had to allocate points to members of their own group (‘in-group’) and to the members of the other group (‘out-group’). These members of the in-group ...
Psychological and social factors decided how the subjects acted and instead of the subjects using their own judgement, they behaved how they thought was required for the situation (McLeod, 2016).
In order to better comprehend and adjust to the dynamics of principles that are applicable to everyday life, we must consider that the reality of social influences
Social comparison is the idea that we are able to gain an accurate sense of ourselves by comparing ourselves to others. Shawn talks about how he looks at other guys around his work, and in his community and says that he believes he 's in "the top third on the "looks" scale." This is an example of how Shawn has compared himself to others in order to determine where he fits in his society. There is, however, a third explanation for Shawn 's high self
Although some psychologists suggest that the negatives of anti-social behavior on tv nullify the pro-social behavior shown, Lovelace and Huston (1983) suggested that if the pro social behavior is shown to be more favourable than the anti-social behavior in the same show, such as the bad guy being caught and punished, then the children will be more likely to follow the pro social behavior.