Conformity And How It Affects People Today - 2207 Words

In today’s society people are constantly shifting towards new beliefs and actions as opposed to sticking with what they are used to or comfortable with. We have revolutionized and constructed a set of boundaries and norms to which the citizens in our society must uphold to. My group decided to conduct experiments on conformity and how it affects people today. So, what exactly is conformity? Our book â€Å"Psychology Perspectives and Connections† defines conformity as the tendency of people to adjust their behavior to what others are doing or to adhere to the norms of their culture. To go along with conformity, social norms are rules about acceptable behavior imposed by the cultural context in which one lives. †¨A couple of weeks ago when the†¦show more content†¦This is just one of the few ways we often conform in our everyday lives.†¨If you think about it people conform all the time. In class Dr. Montesinos asked the class if we could imagine a worl d where nobody conformed. This idea intrigued me because while a world without conformity can be imagined, it is hard to imagine what would come of it in the long run. Carolyn spoke about how everything would be chaotic and nothing would be organized in the world. The human population would greatly be affected if there was no social code or there were no rules for anyone to follow. Conformity plays a crucial role to keeping our society in conditions that are suitable for living.†¨ Conformity can be broken down into two separate branches. Informational social influence and normative social influence. Informational social influences are conformity to the behavior of others because one views them as a source of knowledge about what one is supposed to do. Normative social influence conformity can be defined as conformity to the behavior of others in order to be accepted by them. A simple example of informational social influence would be if you walked by a large group of people looking up into the sky your first reaction would be to look up in the direction in which everyone else is. An example of normative social influence especially in today’s society would be consuming drugs or alcohol. Since people seem to be doing it at an earlier age in this